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OCS in SC etymologies edit

I've noticed you added it some entries, e.g. jara and jarost. OCS should be used only for "learned borrowings" (učene posuđenice) from the attested OCS cannon. Some time ago we (well, I..) in fact used OCS as an attestation of Common Slavic, in those cases when etyma were identical/formally compatible with reconstructed Common Slavic forms, but that approach had the drawback of not taking into consideration actual borrowings from OCS, of which there are a few (the only list I know is from PPGHJ §372), as well as being, well, wrong from a genetic perspective. It would be nice to compile an appendix of all such words! --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 07:05, 27 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

Ah, that makes sense. I've mostly been working from old sources (1820s to 1920s) that tend to list OCS forms of words rather than Proto-Slavic ones; probably most of these sources are somewhat outdated by now. I do have Derksen's much more recent Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon, which lists Proto-Slavic reconstructions and their descendants, but unfortunately it usually omits the paths by which the descendants are derived, for which the older sources are more helpful. I'll change the OCS derivations I previously added to 'akin to ...' or 'cognate to...' to be more accurate. Vorziblix (talk) 18:50, 27 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

Rhymes edit

These are based on the stressed syllable. It's DIDdest, not didDEST, so that doesn't rhyme with vest, nest, etc. Equinox 18:56, 8 February 2015 (UTC)Reply

@Equinox Surely the "Partial rhymes" section, where I added diddest, does not consist of words stressed on the last syllable? All the other words in that section seem to accord with this; none of them are stressed on est. Vorziblix (talk) 20:28, 8 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
Oh, you're right. I'd never seen a "partial rhymes" section before, oddly enough (and don't quite see the usefulness)! Equinox 20:44, 8 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
However, it still seems bad/misleading to include these as generic "rhymes" on the word's entry, since they aren't proper standard rhymes. Equinox 20:45, 8 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
Sure, makes sense! Vorziblix (talk) 20:49, 8 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
It does συντάκτης Βικιλεξικό 02:21, 9 February 2015 (UTC) συντάκτης ΒικιλεξικόReply

франьчьскъ edit

Huge chunk of words in Slovník jazyka staroslověnského don't belong to the OCS canon. E.g. VencNik = Vita paleoslovenica s. Venceslai recentior seu Nikol'skiana [1], which is non-canonical. Neither is Const = Vita Constantini. Старославянский словарь is much better in that regard. These entries should be formatted as ==Church Slavonic== instead. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 23:56, 11 September 2015 (UTC)Reply

Ah, thanks. I’ll be more careful in the future. We still have no separate language codes for the two, though, do we? Vorziblix (talk) 08:56, 12 September 2015 (UTC)Reply
No we don't, which means that we should still use ==Old Church Slavonic== as the header, but include a context label such as maybe {{lb|cu|later Church Slavonic}} or even with a specific region. --WikiTiki89 19:37, 12 September 2015 (UTC)Reply

Renaming reconstructions edit

Please do not rename the pages at the same time as moving them to the new namespace. It's confusing. If they need to be renamed, move them to the new namespace, and then rename them. --WikiTiki89 21:35, 3 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

Sure, my apologies. Vorziblix (talk) 21:39, 3 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

Gloss edit

Just a note... Thanks! —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 03:37, 16 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

Ah, thanks! I was just copying what the preexisting entry at propuh had and forgot about this template. Vorziblix (talk) 03:39, 16 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

Syntactic gemination edit

Hello, I've seen that you started a new discussion on the Beer parlour, so I think you're a quite expert user of the Wikitionary and like to discuss. Would you like to join this discussion? It's about the improper use of asterisks for Italian words with "syntactic gemination", introduced by an Italian user without asking anyone's opinion and without a consensus, but admins say that now a consensus is needed to remove them since nobody noticed them and said anything about them during the last months. So far, the few users who commented agreed that the asterisk symbol shouldn't be used, but I think that we need more users to say that the community reached a consensus... If you want to say your opinion, you're welcome to the talk!

@95.154.3.22 Hello! Unfortunately, while I do a lot of work with Slavic languages, I know practically nothing about Romance languages, so I’m not sure I could really have an informed opinion in that discussion. However, it looks like your proposal is going to pass in any case, so I’m probably not needed anyway. Thanks for the invitation nonetheless! Vorziblix (talk) 18:50, 12 April 2016 (UTC)Reply

You're welcome, and thanks anyway!

egy edit

Could you check if all words are correct titles at thwikt? [2] I don't see same page on enwikt here. --Octahedron80 (talk) 06:24, 7 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Octahedron80 If thwiki has the same transliteration system as enwiki, the titles should be changed as follows:
  • i → .j
  • ink → jnk
  • qAt → qꜣt
  • rmT → rmṯ
mt would not be changed. —Vorziblix (talk) 06:31, 7 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

Hello there edit

I recently fell upon your hard work on Egyptian lemmas and I passed by to congratulate you for that. I wish to extensively keep up the wonderful contribution you offer and I will be extremely glab if you strongly focus on the Old Kingdom Egyptian Language (OKEL) as a whole. I hope you the best. One day I am heading to learn Old Egyptian and be fluent with its scientifically reconstructed pronunciation. Best wished and good continuation. Hanno the Navigator (talk) 15:38, 17 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Hanno the Navigator Thanks, it’s good to know someone is making use of my contributions. I’ll keep working on Egyptian entries for the foreseeable future. Best wishes to you, too, in your learning! —Vorziblix (talk) 05:21, 19 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

Egyptian translations edit

I've been trying to clean up the formatting of translation tables and the existing Egyptian translations are problematic. What do you think of creating a new template {{t-egy}}, to be used as follows: {{t-egy|egy|zꜣw|h=V17-w-A3}}, where the "h" parameter stood for hieroglyphics? It would take all of the other parameters that {{t}} could normally take such as gender. It would display as something like this:

(hopefully with the hieroglyphics in a smaller font size so they fit inline). Putting the hieroglyphics on the same line means there can be multiple translations. Do you like this idea, or have any suggestions? DTLHS (talk) 22:11, 2 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

@DTLHS That looks good to me. Perhaps the order should be switched, as transliterations usually follow native script, and it makes the parentheses less incongruous — something like this:
On the other hand, Egyptian is sort of a special case, since we lemmatize at the transliteration, so whichever order you think is best should be fine.
A note: template parameters seem to have trouble inside <hiero> tags, so that all the templates I’ve made so far have had to take the tags as part of the parameter, like {{t-egy|egy|zꜣw|h=<hiero>V17-w-A3</hiero>}}. Maybe this could be circumvented somehow (Lua?).
Regarding smaller hierogylphic fonts, I don’t know of any way to do that with WikiHiero; it’s pretty outdated technology. It would be nice to switch to something like RES eventually, but right now we may be stuck with large glyphs. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 02:43, 3 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
I gave up trying to make the images smaller. You can see the template in use on magician. DTLHS (talk) 23:48, 4 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
Nice to finally have a standardized way of doing these. Thanks! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 13:57, 5 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

Coptic edit

Thanks for your work on Coptic entries, especially that on previously absent dialects. Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 10:26, 19 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

Glad to be of use. Thank you yourself for making so many of these entries in the first place. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 16:12, 19 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

mryt edit

Hey Vorziblix! I've really appreciated your work recently on Egyptian, and I was wondering whether you could create the entry for mryt as mentioned in Μᾰ́ρειᾰ (Máreia). I only ask because I'm confused about the relationship of Μᾰ́ρειᾰ (Máreia) and Μᾰρεῶτῐς (Mareôtis) to mryt (why is there no τ (t) in Μᾰ́ρειᾰ (Máreia)?). Thanks. —JohnC5 16:44, 27 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

@JohnC5 Thanks! and done. Regarding τ (t), the Egyptian feminine suffix -t was pronounced in Old Egyptian, but by Late Egyptian it had largely become silent (compare Coptic, where it’s no longer written at all). Perhaps we’re looking at borrowings from two different times, or from two different dialects, one more conservative than the other? — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 21:17, 27 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
Ah, thanks for the explanation and writing the page. I thinks your theory sounds very plausible, if difficult to confirm. —JohnC5 04:24, 28 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

Hello again! Since you did such a great job with my last request, I was wondering whether you could take a look at Μοῖρῐς (Moîris). The Wikipedia page seems to imply that the source would be mr-wr, though in this case mr (canal) + wr (great). Can you confirm this, and do you know what the hieroglyphs would look like? Thanks! —JohnC5 07:48, 30 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

A wild Ancient Greek borrowing from Egyptian appears. JohnC5 uses "request help from Vorziblix" against Νίτωκρις (Nítōkris). —JohnC5 01:18, 13 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
It’s super effective! Hm, this one seems to have some recent debate surrounding it (as far as the name of the pharaoh goes), but the immediate derivation, at least, seems clear and well-accepted. I’ll go through and add what I can. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 08:15, 13 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
@JohnC5 There you go, all done! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 20:35, 13 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thanks so much! —JohnC5 22:34, 13 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Howdy! Might I interest you in the Ancient Greek term Σάϊς (Sáïs)? —JohnC5 02:51, 24 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Coptic dialect labels edit

With my changes to Coptic alternative forms sections, labels can now be placed in Module:cop:Dialects, to automatically link dialect names for instance. I'll fill in a bunch from Module:labels/data/subvarieties. — Eru·tuon 23:04, 10 August 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Erutuon: Thanks, I hadn’t known about {{alter}} at all before. I might make some additions to alias a few more dialect names, even if they don’t (yet) have a Wikipedia section to link to. Do you think sigla (as at WT:About Coptic etc.) should be usable as aliases? — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 04:58, 11 August 2017 (UTC)Reply
Hmm, I never responded. Well, you can use whatever you like for a label or an alias. (Ancient Greek has its weird three-letter codes for dialects, like att for Attic.) The only thing is to look out for the likelihood of ambiguity or misuse of the labels or aliases you add. But that should be pretty easy, as Coptic entries aren't all that numerous. — Eru·tuon 03:53, 13 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

šbot edit

Hi. I am looking for the Coptic spelling of this word for ճիպոտ (čipot). Can you help? --Vahag (talk) 20:29, 27 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Vahagn Petrosyan: Sure! The Coptic is ϣⲃⲱⲧ (šbōt), and the Egyptian is
SAAbd
xt
, which in our transliteration scheme would give šꜣbd, although other variant writings exist. Both Černý and Hoch call the Egyptian word a borrowing from Semitic. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 02:57, 28 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thanks. If Coptic is borrowed from Semitic, then the Armenian too is probably from some Semitic form. I can't imagine a word jumping from Egypt into Armenia. --Vahag (talk) 09:20, 28 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Meroitic edit

The etyma at apov and pelmoz could use a check. Everyone who works on Meroitic is an Egyptologist, so I should trust them, but it deserves a once-over. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 06:11, 5 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Metaknowledge: Both are correct, although the mr in mr-mšꜥ is just an abbreviated form of jmj-r, so I’ll have the link go to jmj-r-mšꜥ. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 07:23, 5 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

Coptic verb conj. edit

Btw. I recently make an experimental template for conjugation of Coptic verbs. I need to make a few tweaks and check the spelling, but I wanted to ask others who work on Coptic words and entries for thoughts. Template: cop-conj. (you don't need to say anything if you don't care ;-) ) - Algentem (talk) 08:40, 5 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Algentem: Looks like a good start! Linking all the inflections in the table would be a good idea. Including the traditional terminology (Future I, Future II, Future III, and so forth) alongside the newer names could also be helpful, although it might clutter up the table. Otherwise, there are a few alternative inflected forms missing here and there, but all in all it looks good. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 18:16, 5 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
Hey, thanks for the feedback! Adding the classical designations did indeed clutter the table, but I added them as tooltips (good enough?). I also linked the first row, but I found the text to be too large. Is there anything in particular missing? This is how it looks like now: ⲙⲟⲟϣⲉ. - Algentem (talk) 11:42, 6 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Algentem: You can link them with {{cop-table entry}}, letting the transliteration show up on a separate line, and you can also edit that template to change the text size as needed. The tooltips are a nice touch! As for missing material, for example, the second-person feminine singular present can also have ⲧⲉⲣ (ter) or ⲧⲣ (tr) instead of ⲧⲉ (te), etc., but one can always go through and add those later. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 12:49, 6 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

Admin edit

Hi. Fancy becoming a Wiktionary admin? --Rerum scriptor (talk) 21:48, 5 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Rerum scriptor: Hello! Hmm, after considering a while, I think it’d be helpful, particularly to expedite getting rid of spam and cleaning up redirects from moved pages, as well as to have a dedicated admin involved with Egyptian/Coptic, so I’ll say yes. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 00:35, 6 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
I'm glad to hear it. You've been around for quite some time, and seem knowledgeable, linguistically informed and –perhaps even more importantly– level-headed, so it should go fine. Calling in @JohnC5, Meta knowledge, Vahagn Petrosyan, as the administrators having contributed most recently to this talkpage, for a second opinion. --Rerum scriptor (talk) 23:17, 10 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
I've had only positive interactions with Vorziblix, and I like their work a lot. That said, they have not been this active for very long (I hardly remember seeing them around before recently), and I suspect other members of the community will not even recognise their name. Especially given the fact that there are people who oppose any WF nom on principle, I really don't know if a bid for adminship would be successful. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 19:28, 12 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

It might be best to let this rest for now, then. Thanks in any case for the input (and thanks to @Rerum scriptor for your confidence). — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 05:31, 13 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

For what it's worth, I would have voted in support without question. --Vahag (talk) 10:00, 13 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thanks! Maybe sometime down the line. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 01:38, 14 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
Same here, I'd vote for you. Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 14:40, 21 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
You should at least be a rollbacker - then you can undo multiple vandalisms with one key. SemperBlotto (talk) 21:34, 19 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
Sure, that’d be useful. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 22:15, 19 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
Made you a rollbacker now. Wyang (talk) 08:29, 20 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

I'm considering nominating you for adminship again. Your work has been extensive, well-researched, and beyond reproach. Your recent module coding has been competent and comprehensible, though you are not yet fully versed in the devilish idiom of Lua on Wiktionary. I think you would be well served by the power to move pages without redirect, and I hope you expand your well-researched articles throughout the Afro-Asiatic family. —*i̯óh₁nC[5] 03:23, 7 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

@JohnC5: Thanks! I’d be all right with that, if you think I’m ready for it. I’ll do my best to keep up my work. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 05:44, 7 January 2018 (UTC)Reply
Please accept the nomination here. —*i̯óh₁nC[5] 06:13, 7 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

Bohairic Coptic Conjugator edit

Hello Vorziblix, I hope everything finds you well,

Inspiration from @Algentem's conjugator has caused me to effect my own conjugator for the Bohairic Dialect @Bohairic Coptic conjugator template. It is complete sans verb forms(if they can even be added to the table) i.e. Absolute, Construct, Pronominal, and Qualitative; from my knowledge every verb form set is different for every verb. Here is a sample of a verb: Bohairic Coptic conjugator:ϫⲓⲙⲓ.

--Aearthrise
E23
(Ⲁⲉⲁⲣⲑⲣⲓⲥⲉ) 21:07, 6 October 2017‎(UTC)
@Aearthrise: Hello! Hope things are well for you too, and thanks for the work on making this. I’m not all that versed in Bohairic morphology, so I defer to your knowledge there, but you could always include the missing forms as parameters passed to the template. Just a few things regarding the structure of the table:
  1. It’s good to have each inflected form linked (including the prefix, not just the stem). Ideally, this will later facilitate the creation of entries for each form. I’d recommend using {{cop-table entry}} as with the Sahidic table above.
  2. It seems like there’s some (accidentally created?) superfluous empty cells among the headings at the top of the table, right under the person and gender headings; it’d be good to get rid of these. Including the pronouns there might also be more clutter than helpful (we should have a separate table for all the pronouns, to be included at each pronoun entry).
  3. A consistent color scheme between the Bohairic and Sahidic templates would probably be preferable to having different colors for different dialect tables. From an aesthetic standpoint I prefer the all-grey scheme, but if you and @Algentem decide on something more colorful, that’d be fine too. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 18:32, 7 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Vorziblix:Thank you for the feedback.
1.I have edited the table to include the prefixes and removed the superfluous empty cells; I don't know how to use the coptic table template.
2.I prefer to have the pronouns than to not; A separate table for all pronouns at each pronoun entry is a good idea.
3.Algentem and I have agreed to use colors, but much more muted than what I had: here is a palette swap.
A quick question: for some of the third person nominative conjugations, as in 'ⲁⲣⲉ ⲡⲓⲣⲱⲙⲓ ϫⲓⲙⲓ', I put '-', 'ⲁⲣⲉ - ϫⲓⲙⲓ'. Is there a way I can indicate that the '-' should be a noun?
--Aearthrise
E23
(Ⲁⲉⲁⲣⲑⲣⲓⲥⲉ) 15:28, 7 October 2017‎(UTC)
@Aearthrise: Looks good, and I see you got the template figured out. I don’t know that there’s any good/standard way to indicate that there should be a noun, but you could perhaps add a footnote to the column header stating as much. It might be worthwhile to ask in the Beer Parlour and see if anyone’s dealt with a similar situation and come up with a better solution. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 06:47, 8 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

Copto-Greek verbs and light verbs in Coptic edit

I'd appreciate your thoughts on a few matters concerning how Greek verbs and light verbs should be treated. It seems to me that treating the 'prefixed' imperatives or infinitives of Greek verbs as lemmas would at the very least suggest a lenient inclusion of light verbs, as these are all a nominal state of ⲉⲓⲣⲉ (eire)/ⲓⲣⲓ (iri) with the Greek verb and that doesn't differ all that much from most light verbs. It seems inconsistent to me to treat ⲉⲣ-/ⲉⲗ- + Greek verb root and ⲉⲣ-/ⲉⲗ- + Egyptian noun as very different things after all. I don't mind a liberal inclusion of light verbs, but I think it may prove controversial with some. Either way, a decision has to be made eventually.

Another thing is the etymology of prefixed Greek verbs. Not many of them have etymologies yet, but ⲉⲣⲯⲁⲗⲓⲛ (erpsalin) and ⲉⲣⲫⲟⲣⲓⲛ (erphorin) are some that have. I think the Coptic editors should eventually decide on whether to include forms like ⲯⲁⲗⲓⲛ (psalin) and ⲫⲟⲣⲓⲛ (phorin) (which probably aren't attested and aren't very useful to have either, so I would oppose) or to directly link to the Greek in etymology sections. Of course, the other option is to treat the bare Greek roots as the lemmas, but I think that's rather useless if the form never appears by itself. Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 14:39, 21 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Lingo Bingo Dingo: I’d be in favor of including all attested light verb constructions as lemmas. After all, these are derived, not inflected, forms, and we don’t have the space restrictions of a paper dictionary; anyway, we already include light verb constructions in other languages, so there seems to be consensus that they fall within WT:CFI.
I’d also agree with you in opposing the inclusion of unattested Greek bare infinitives in Coptic; in Egedi 2016, Remarks on loan verb integration into Coptic, the author surveys cross-dialectal verb borrowing and notes that “the hypothetical fourth pattern ‘∅ infinitive’ does not arise at all”, so we don’t have to worry about these forms surfacing in other dialects. Linking directly to Greek in etymology sections would then make more sense (the light verb being added in the process of borrowing, rather than after borrowing). — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 21:16, 21 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for the reply. I should probably create a BP discussion for this soon so we can have a uniform standard. The following issues also need to be settled, as there seem to be different practices:
  1. Whether to treat nominal states and pronominal states as prefixes or as specific parts of speech (e.g. nouns, verbs, prepositions, etc.) in headers and head lines.
  2. How to include nominal states and pronominal states in the dictionary (e.g. with or without hyphens or equal signs) and how to display them in head lines. Adding construct states with hyphens for both seems better to me, but I'd like to display pronominal states in heads with equal signs according to the convention.
  3. Whether to label Greek borrowings with dialect tags. I previously didn't do this, but it seems like a very good idea to do so even when a word is present in all dialects.
I've added a few different possible implementations of 1 & 2 at ⲛ- (n-) by way of example, though other options are also possible. Also pinging @Aearthrise, Algentem, DerekWinters to let them know of this thread. Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 11:22, 23 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
@Lingo Bingo Dingo: Yeah, it’s definitely a good idea to settle on standards as soon as we can; right now, WT:About Coptic mostly just specifies information about dialects, but whatever we settle on should be added there. For the specific points:
  1. I don’t have a strong preference here but lean toward using specific parts of speech wherever it’s possible to specify them.
  2. I would support using hyphens with nominal states, but for pronominal states I’d suggest the oblique double hyphen ⸗. Templates often handle the equals sign poorly, and in any case the use of the equals sign only began as a typographical kludge when the oblique double hyphen was unavailable; Crum, Černý, Lambdin, etc. consistently use ⸗. (It’s also already supported by the Coptic sorting module; not sure if that module would choke on equals signs.)
  3. Greek verbs definitely need this since different dialects borrow them in different forms; I’d support it for other parts of speech as well. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 15:50, 23 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
I don't have much to add other than that for borrowing Greek verbs, we can have the etymology section similarly to how Telugu does it for verbs borrowed from Sanskrit: వర్ణించు (varṇiñcu). DerekWinters (talk) 19:02, 23 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
Sounds good to me! All that’s left is to see what other editors think. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 04:50, 24 October 2017 (UTC)Reply
Okay, I have replaced the equal sign with the double hyphen and added an example modelled on the Telugu entry to the section on Greek verbs. The BP topic is here. Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 12:24, 24 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

EWDC edit

Hi! Here are your 10 random missing English words for this month. Let me know if you'd prefer a secret alert by e-mail next time.

Equinox 00:53, 5 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

EWDC #2 edit

Hi! Here are your 10 random missing English words for this month.

Equinox 19:39, 30 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

Collecting Egyptian hapax legomena? edit

There is currently no Category:Egyptian hapax legomena though you have created ḫt-n-šnj. Do you think it makes sense for you to collect them? Writing {{lb|egy|hapax legomenon}} does it but maybe the layout makes you prefer manual categorization.
As I am already grabbing your attention: Fancy adding Egyptian translations to field? Palaestrator verborum sis loquier 🗣 09:14, 26 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Yes, categorizing them is definitely a good idea; there are a handful more I’ve added in the past, too (ꜣw-ḥr, ḫꜣz, ꜣꜥz). Didn’t realize {{lb}} supported that label, but it looks fine to me. I’ll add translations to field shortly. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 10:20, 26 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
I don’t know though why it does not support dis legomenon. What’s the superordinate term for hapax legomenon, dis legomenon, …? Palaestrator verborum sis loquier 🗣 10:34, 26 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
I’d guess the lack of ‘dis legomenon’ support is a result of some combination of the term being less commonly used and encountered, the property of having two attestations being less interesting than that of having only one, and the rarity with which even the hapax legomenon label is applied (which suggests a ‘dis legomenon’ label would be even less used). You could suggest it over at Module talk:labels or at the Grease Pit if you’d find it useful.
I don’t know myself of any superordinate term for all of these; one could always go with ‘rarely attested words’ or the like if needed, I suppose. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 11:12, 26 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
I added "hapax legomenon" to {{lb}} a few months ago, but I simply did not think of "dis legomenon" at that time. If you want to add it, it's here. --Per utramque cavernam (talk) 11:22, 26 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
Currently the term dis legomenon has zero uses on Wiktionary, so I don’t know what could be categorized in it, but Vorziblix surely finds some dis legomena, Egyptian scholarship is likely a copious source for it. Palaestrator verborum sis loquier 🗣 12:30, 26 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
There’s ꜥmꜥm (bread container) and (to tread) as far as Egyptian dis legomena go, but I’ll wait until more crop up before looking into categorizing anything. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 13:43, 26 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Question edit

hello, do you prefer Glagolitic or Cyrillic alphabet? --2A02:2788:A4:F44:F536:D76F:C08:ABC2 19:03, 29 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Are these even commensurable from the standpoint of the present? Palaestrator verborum sis loquier 🗣 19:16, 29 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
They were probably one-to-one equivalent in the original alphabets, but in the present they’re generally not commensurate. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 19:25, 29 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
@2A02:2788:A4:F44:F536:D76F:C08:ABC2: I prefer Glagolitic myself, but particularly the round Glagolitic, not the later square version. Old Cyrillic ustav is also nice, but I’m less a fan of the civil script or modern Cyrillic. (This is all from a strictly aesthetic standpoint, of course.)
One note, though: most currently existing Glagolitic fonts are awful and fail to capture the look or intended forms of the original manuscripts. The letter Ⰾ in particular is always butchered (in the oldest manuscripts the three circles are all, well, circles, they don’t touch, and they’re instead connected by three lines). — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 19:25, 29 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
This is the blocked user User: Awesomemeeos fyi. —AryamanA (मुझसे बात करेंयोगदान) 23:28, 29 December 2017 (UTC)Reply
Oh, I see, thanks. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 23:46, 29 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

affret etymology edit

Hi. You entered an ety of a- + fret; is that right? Chambers 1908 says "probably from Italian affrettare, to hasten". Equinox 23:26, 29 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Equinox: Looking at Oxford, they have two senses, one ‘To fret, annoy, trouble’ from a- + fret and one ‘Furious onset; immediate attack’ from affrettare; you’re right that the sense currently there is from the latter. I (or whatever source I was using six years ago) must have confused or conflated the two; my apologies! This was one of the first words I ever added, and I’ve tried to be more careful since those days. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 23:44, 29 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

EWDC #3 edit

Hi! Here are your 10 random missing English words for this month.

Equinox 04:50, 30 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Coptic. Dialect J edit

Hello! You wrote Dialects section in Wiktionary:About_Coptic. I have a question about it. You mentioned there Dialect J. What is that? I'm not able to find any info about it anywhere. 212.90.63.227 20:30, 31 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

Unfortunately information on Dialect J is extremely sparse and hard to find, so my own knowledge of it is limited. It’s mentioned a few times in the Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia, e.g. at the entry for Coptic alphabets, where it says that ‘J is the language of a Coptic schoolboy’s tablet (end [?] of third century; cf. ibid. [Kasser, 1981a], pp. 113–115)’. It is a ‘very small subdialect’ accounting for 0.001 percent of Coptic texts. I imagine you could find more information if you looked up pages 113–115 of Rodolphe Kasser’s Prolégomènes à un essai de classification systématique des dialectes et subdialectes coptes selon les critères de la phonétique, vol. III: Systèmes orthographiques et catégorries dialectales, but unfortunately I don’t have access to that work myself. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 02:25, 1 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
Further information is given in the article on Dialect i, where it is mentioned that J is from ‘the text of Crum (1934; from the second half of the third century, bought in Luxor), which indeed presents […] a vulgar orthography that appears rather strange’. There is speculation that J may be a variant of i or an abberant form of A, but this is ‘lacking proof’. The Crum 1934 work cited is “Un Psaume en dialecte d’Akhmîm” in Mémoires de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale 67 (1934):73-86, if you’re interested. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 04:05, 1 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for your answer. I looked for Kasser's article you pointed (Prolégomènes... vol. III... in Le Muséon 94, 1981). Although I wasn't able to read it, I found out something with a help of snippets. There he divided all the dialects into six groups (dialects and subdialects are in brackets): Groupe akhmimique (A, C?), Groupe lycopolitain (i, i7, L, L4, J), Groupe mésokémique (M), Groupe fayoumique (F, F4, F7, F8, F9, V, V4?, H, N?), Groupe saïdique (P, S), Groupe bohaïrique (B, B4, B7, B71?, B74?, G) (pp. 120-122). Dialect J is in Groupe lycopolitain. At the page 120: "J : protodialecte (? partiellement sporadique) d'une variété de L mal connue et non attestée plus tard (cf. 23.3.14)". Very strange that he never mentioned Dialect J in his main entries (Dialects, Dialects, Grouping and Major Groups of and Geography, Dialectal) for Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia, although he took the same approach of classification in Dialects, Grouping and Major Groups of.
P.S. I also found his Les Dialectes coptes, where he describes Dialects C, D, E, N. 212.90.63.227 15:10, 1 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
P.P.S. I also wanted to ask about Dialect X1. It can be seen, for example, in the 12th map of Geography, Dialectal (p. 3). But I already found it in one of the map sources. Wolf-Peter Funk's "Dialects Wanting Homes: A Numerical Approach to the Early Varieties of Coptic": "X1 Dialect attested by a single fragmentary manuscript (Pauline Epistles, bound with Cambridge Univ. Libr. Or. 1699); see Funk (1986a: 50f.)" (in Historical Dialectology, Regional and Social, ed. J. Fisiak (1988), p. 157). 212.90.63.227 20:22, 1 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
Yes, I’m not sure either why J was excluded from the main entries; it is pretty odd. Regarding X1, I must confess I don’t remember having come across it before, so I don’t know any more about it than you do, and I’ve no idea where to classify it. It looks like the use of the label might be idiosyncratic to that single Funk paper, though. Thanks for the links and references! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 11:52, 2 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
I guessed it actually :-). Funk attested Dialect X1 or Dialect of Paul's fragments (Dialekt der Paulus-Fragmente) by fragments of Pauline Epistles from so-called Cambridge manuscript. The paper starts with assessments that the manuscript belongs to Lycopolitan ("subachmimisehen") group. As I understand, the question is whether the dialect can be reduced to any other known dialects of L or it is independent. And while Funk claimed that the dialect was independent, Kasser believed that the dialect was a subdialect of L4 (manichaean texts). It certantly has interesting characteristics, but for Kasser the dialect was just a variation of L4 with siglum L43 ("Orthographe et phonologie de ia variete subdialectale lycopolitaine des textes gnostiques coptes de Nag Hammadi" in Le Muséon 97, 1984, pp. 310, 312). 212.90.63.227 16:02, 2 February 2018 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for the credit on my coptic appendix edit

I have created a coptic appendix for Bohairic/Fayyumic Coptic and I would like to gauge your thoughts on them in terms of accuracy and usefulness.

@Aearthrise: Thanks for your work! I’ve skimmed over it, and it seems like a useful summary. A few notes:
  • The pronoun section seems out of place for an appendix on verbs. Perhaps a template like this one would be more useful for displaying the personal pronouns at each pronoun entry instead.
  • Under ‘consonant changes’, it should presumably say the changes occur preceding the vilminor/blemner letters, not following them.
  • It looks like part of a sentence might have been accidentally deleted under ‘durative sentences’.
  • It’d be nice, for each verb form, to eventually have a summary of its meaning and use, if you have a chance to get around to it sometime.
In general, it’s a promising beginning. Thanks! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 11:52, 2 February 2018 (UTC)Reply

EWDC #4 edit

Hi! Here are your 10 random missing English words for this month.

Equinox 23:30, 1 February 2018 (UTC)Reply


Any suggestions for getting into the Ancient Egyptian lexicon? edit

I noticed you were seriously involved in the ancient Egyptian lemmas and I'm super interested in Ancient Egyptian. How do you recommend I can get into this so that I can do it as good as you do, since I already have some words (mostly names) I'd like to post. AncientEgypt23 (talk) 16:31, 9 February 2018 (UTC)Reply


@AncientEgypt23: Hello! There are a number of possible places to go from:
  • As far a starting point for learning the language in general goes, it’s best to pick up a modern grammar of Middle Egyptian and read through it to start off; Hoch’s grammar and Allen’s grammar are probably the best English-language choices currently available, and Loprieno’s introduction is also great if you have a strong background in linguistics (but otherwise best left for later). All three are currently on archive.org. Allen and Hoch differ on a few points of terminology and interpretation, where Wiktionary tends to follow Allen, but either one provides a solid foundation.
  • For tools relating specifically to information on the lexicon, there’s a lot of useful ones readily available:
    • Faulkner’s dictionary is the best currently existing English-Egyptian dictionary, although it only covers the Middle Egyptian period.
    • The Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae is probably the best lexicographic resource available; it lets you look up words and see all the texts where they’re attested as well as a host of other tools. You have to register on the site to use this, but it’s free. Unfortunately the interface can be hard to get used to, and a knowledge of German can be helpful.
    • The most comprehensive and useful dictionary of Egyptian existing to date is the Wörterbuch der Aegyptischen Sprache, which can be downloaded here as a series of PDF files or otherwise accessed from a page within the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae. It’s written in German, though, so it may not be the most accessible work if you speak only English.
    • Most grammars of Egyptian include vocabulary at the back for reference.
    • Foreign words and names in Egyptian were written using a different system from native words. The writing of native Egyptian words represented only the consonants, leaving the vowels unwritten, but the writing of foreign words tried to represent both consonants and vowels using a system called ‘group-writing’. This system changed several times over the course of Egyptian history; there’s some detailed information about it in James Hoch’s Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period (unfortunately not readily available anywhere online).
    • Avoid anything written by E. A. Wallis Budge; it’s all horribly outdated.
  • As far as stuff helpful for editing Egyptian entries on Wiktionary goes, Wiktionary:About Egyptian describes our basic policies, and on this page you can find the basic template I use for making Egyptian entries.
  • Citing the source where you found your information is always a good idea; unfortunately we’ve had a few users adding nonsense to Egyptian entries before, so it’s nice to be able to verify what gets added.
If you have questions about anything I’d be happy to help. Otherwise, you can get started adding entries if you like, and I can fix them up afterward if needed. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 19:57, 9 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
Wow thanks! One last question, some of the names I posted as examples are subject to differing eras of pronunciation. Like, Alexander's name had the "l" sound in it, but nowadays it's considered an aleph. When using {{egy-IPA-E}}, do we leave it as it is or insert the pronunciation that it actually would've been? I see on the policy page you linked that it says to at least write it as "ꜣ", but it doesn't say what is recommended for transliteration. AncientEgypt23 (talk) 20:11, 9 February 2018 (UTC)Reply
@AncientEgypt23: {{egy-IPA-E}} generates the conventional ‘Egyptological pronunciation’, which is used by modern Egyptologists for convenience, but was not how the ancient Egyptians actually pronounced the words. The actual ancient pronunciation was often much different; you can check the entry at jnk for an example showing the reconstructed ancient pronunciation during various stages of the language. So, in short, when using {{egy-IPA-E}} you should leave it as it is, but you can also add the reconstructed ancient pronunciations above that template if they’re known. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 20:30, 9 February 2018 (UTC)Reply

Coptic/Demotic Descendants edit

Coptic script has been recorded since the first century AD, and Demotic script until the fifth century AD. There are words that overlap in this early period; e.g. Old Coptic ⲥⲟⲩ(star) overlaps with the transliteration of the Demotic spelling, which is sw. The descendant from ⲥⲟⲩ is ⲥⲓⲟⲩ(Bohairic, Fayyumic, Sahidic). In the etymology section, I find it misleading to put that ⲥⲟⲩ is a descendant of Demotic when the only difference is script, not time period. I would like to know how I would rectify this situation.

--Aearthrise
E23
(Ⲁⲉⲁⲣⲑⲣⲓⲥⲉ) 17:49, 13 February 2018‎(UTC)
@Aearthrise: Yeah, I’m not entirely sure how to deal with Old Coptic myself; I avoided creating Old Coptic entries for that very reason. Old Coptic isn’t really a language or dialect; it’s just the name for pagan texts written in a particular kind of script. The Old Coptic script was used to write various dialects, even including classical Egyptian in one case.
I would definitely avoid labelling later Coptic words as descendants of Old Coptic ones. Old Coptic is not the source dialect that later diverged into the other Coptic dialects; it’s not a single particular dialect or langauge at all, and it was mostly used after Coptic had already started to break into different dialects, so any given Old Coptic word is not likely to be ancestral to the equivalent Coptic word from a later dialect. The Old Coptic forms are best treated as alternative forms, not ancestors, of other Coptic words.
Demotic and Old Coptic do overlap in time period, but by that time written Demotic no longer reflected the spoken language. It was conservative and increasingly archaic, reflecting what the language had been like a few centuries before. Old Coptic, on the other hand, (usually) more closely reflected the spoken language, which had changed in the meantime, so it (usually) represents a later stage of the language. The grammar, for example, is closer to later Coptic than to Demotic. For that reason, it still makes a good amount of sense to describe Old Coptic as a descendant of Demotic. (Exceptions exist, like that classical Egyptian papyrus mentioned above, but that probably shouldn’t be treated as Coptic at all, despite the script.)
tl;dr: I’d recommend treating Old Coptic as descended from Demotic but not ancestral to the later Coptic dialects. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 00:51, 14 February 2018 (UTC)Reply

Gratitude edit

I would like to extend my thanks to you for being so patient with User:AncientEgypt23, and attempting to help them. It was very noble of you to take out so much of your time to help someone else. PseudoSkull (talk) 17:24, 26 February 2018 (UTC)Reply

Thanks! I tried as best I could, even if it regrettably didn’t work out. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 23:12, 26 February 2018 (UTC)Reply

EWDC #5 edit

Hi! Here are your 10 random missing English words for this month.

Equinox 00:23, 3 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Construct states edit

It looks like a lot of construct states have been added without hyphens or double oblique hyphens, sometimes leading to doublets like ⲉⲣ (er), ⲉⲣ- (er-). Any opinion on this? ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 13:11, 9 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

@Lingo Bingo Dingo: I’d say the doublets should definitely be merged, ideally in favor of the appropriately hyphenated versions, and the non-doublets should also be moved to properly hyphenated entry names for consistency’s sake. After all, consensus leaned toward including the hyphens when Coptic standardization was last discussed. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 14:42, 9 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
That's what I thought (and, as a result, that's what WT:ACOP now says) but looking at the discussion, it looks like the consensus wasn't very strong (basically you and me in favour of having the entries in hyphenated namespaces, with the others showing qualified support or supporting an alternative).
Also, could you recommend any literature on Coptic phonology? ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 10:33, 10 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Lingo Bingo Dingo: Hmm, I suppose you’re right; two in favor, two ‘fine’/‘OK’, and one against isn’t too strong of a consensus. Still, having consistency in the entries one way or the other is, I think, worthwhile, and this does seem to be the favored option of the two, even if a bit weakly.
Regarding Coptic phonology, a good quick modern overview appears in section 3.6 of Loprieno’s Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction (or section 22.6 here, which is the same thing republished). Carsten Peust’s Egyptian Phonology: An Introduction to the Phonology of a Dead Language goes into much more detail in certain areas of Coptic phonology and provides a dissenting voice regarding some of Loprieno’s conclusions. Hintze’s Zur koptischen Phonologie is an excellent paper and approaches the subject more synchronically than diachronically. There’s also entries in the Coptic Encyclopedia, such as “Aleph”, “ꜥAyin”, Cryptophoneme, Syllabication, etc., that summarize specific phonological topics. Worrell’s Coptic Sounds was an important publication in the field, but is in many respects outdated by now. Overall, some aspects of Coptic phonology are still under debate and revision, so authors may not always agree on every detail. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 23:51, 11 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Coptic Sources edit

Hello Vorziblix. For better Coptic pages, I would like start adding to sources. You showed me how to find them at an earlier time, thank you, but I don't remember where you wrote the process. Might you provide me the instructions again?

--Aearthrise
E23
(Ⲁⲉⲁⲣⲑⲣⲓⲥⲉ) 14:00 10 March 2018 (UTC)
@Aearthrise: Hello! I’m not exactly sure what you mean by ‘adding to sources’. Do you mean adding citations to reference works? — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 23:57, 11 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Vorziblix: Yes, I would like to learn how to use citations and references. The only reference I can understand is the Crum Coptic dictionary because it has a link.
--Aearthrise
E23
(Ⲁⲉⲁⲣⲑⲣⲓⲥⲉ) 20:12 11 March 2018 (UTC)
@Aearthrise: Ah, all right. Most references are made using reference templates; you can see all the reference templates that exist for works specifically dealing with Coptic at Category:Coptic reference templates, and, if needed, you can make new templates by following the model of existing templates. Generally, references give at least the author and the title of the work cited, so you can find the relevant work online or in a library, etc., with that information. Unfortunately not all works are available online, so some can’t be referenced with a link. Regarding the sources I gave you earlier, I think these are the ones I linked for you (correct me if you meant something else):
‘For Demotic the standard lexicographical works are Wolja Erichsen’s Demotisches Glossar and the Chicago Demotic Dictionary, and for Egyptian you have the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache and the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae freely available. For Coptic, Crum’s classic dictionary is online.’
If you’re looking for further resources in any specific area, I might be able to provide them. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 12:54, 12 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Damascus edit

The etymology here should probably go back to Egyptian, no? I'm a little lost on where the ultimate origin is, and how the Aramaic route that led to European languages diverged from however it got to Arabic. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 00:28, 14 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

@Metaknowledge: As far as I can gather, it looks like the origin is unknown. Egyptian tjmsqw is definitely a loanword from some local language: the orthography is New Kingdom ‘group-writing’ (conventionally used for writing foreign words) representing ta-mas-qu2 per {{R:egy:Hoch 1994}}’s system, and in any case there’s no plausible Egyptian-internal etymology, and t and q are incompatible in Egyptian roots. Given that it’s not native Egyptian, the other names are likely to also be loans from the original language rather than from Egyptian. I’d guess the original name was either Semitic or perhaps Hurrian, but I’ve found no definitive modern answer; many Semitic etymologies have apparently been proposed and later refuted. The Aramaic looks to be folk-etymologized; per Pitard’s Ancient Damascus: A Historical Study, the -r- may be no older than the Persian Period, and it is ‘unlikely that it is primitive’. I’d assume the Greek is also from a form without -r- rather than the given Aramaic. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 19:04, 14 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
Thank you. I've noted that the Egyptian term is borrowed; even if we don't know the origin, I reckon it's worth making that explicit in entries. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 20:20, 14 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Coptic ⲉⲧⲉ- edit

Might you know or have the etymology of the Coptic usage ⲉⲧⲉ (that is, that are, etc.)?

@Aearthrise: The shorter form ⲉⲧ- (et-) is from ntj (which is), with an irregular loss of the initial n. ⲉⲧⲉ- (ete-) is the same word compounded with jw (proclitic particle), that is, it comes from a compound of ntj jw. References: {{R:egy:Peust}}, p. 157 and {{R:cop:Černý}}, p. 38. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 02:54, 20 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Vorziblix: Thank you Vorziblix, I have made the entries!

Discord verification edit

Hi, I want to verify that it actually is you who joined the Discord server under the username Uzhdarchios#1434. Please reply that it was you if it was, and I will give you the administrator role. Thanks. PseudoSkull (talk) 06:04, 27 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Hey, it’s me indeed. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 06:05, 27 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

EWDC #6 edit

Hi! Here are your 10 random missing English words for this month.

Equinox 21:24, 8 April 2018 (UTC)Reply

Ⲉⲃⲟⲗ edit

I see the hieroglyphics you had posted were "Beneru"

bn
r
wpr

. I am having trouble wrapping my brain around its evolution into ebol ⲉⲃⲟⲗ.

@Aearthrise Well, ‘beneru’ is a non-historical modern conventional representation that is not how the Egyptians would have pronounced the word at all. Since no vowels were written in pre-Coptic Egyptian, the hieroglyphs properly represent bnrw; all the ‘e’ vowels in modern Anglicizations of Egyptian words are modern inventions added for convenience, but were not there historically, and
A
,
a
,
w
,
i
, and
y
historically represented consonants, not vowels. They only may have (debatably) represented vowels in transcriptions of foreign loanwords, but they were always consonants in native Egyptian words.
The reconstructed syllabification rules for Egyptian imply that bnrw would have been pronounced /b˘nɾ˘w/ in Old Egyptian, where ˘ represents an unknown short vowel. During the late Middle Kingdom to the early New Kingdom, final -w and -j were lost, along with any unstressed short vowels that immediately preceded them. Also, around the time of the New Kingdom, /b/ changed into /β/ amost everywhere. Thus, the word would have been pronounced /β˘nɾ/ by Late Egyptian.
In the course of evolution from Late Egyptian to Demotic (or perhaps even earlier), some instances of /ɾ/ unpredictably became /l/. Further, a process called sonorant shift took place in many words, whereby the phonemes /m/, /n/, /ɾ/, /l/, and /β/ often changed into each other when they appeared near each other. In this particular word we see an assimilatory sonorant shift in which /n/ assimilated to the following /l/. Finally, doubled consonants simplified to single ones. Thus /β˘nɾ/ became /β˘nl/, then /β˘ll/, then /β˘l/, which is exactly the structure we see in Coptic ⲃⲟⲗ (bol, outside). ⲉⲃⲟⲗ (ebol) is just this noun with a prefix ⲉ- (e-) added to the front.
If you want detailed information about the way Egyptian sounds evolved into Coptic sounds, see Appendix:Egyptian pronunciation. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 21:48, 9 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Aearthrise Incidentally, Coptic ⲛⲁ- (na-) as a marker of the imperfect derives from Egyptian wn.jn and not n; this paper has details. The inflectional prefix ⲁ- (a-) for the Present II also comes from Late Egyptian j.jr (a form of jrj (to do)) and not (remember, the vulture was not a vowel!). If you have any other questions, feel free to ask! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 22:05, 9 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Vorziblix: Thank you, you are a master of the Egyptian language! I have one book at my disposal to study Hieroglyphics- 'How to read Egyptian Hieroglyphs, by Mark Collier & Bill Manley'. The book allows me to "read" the Egyptian language(mostly learning Middle Kingdom words), but it barely teaches the linguistic properties of the medu nuteru. The grammar is very simplified- the 5 verb tenses in the book are: Past, Present, Future, Verb Negation, and the Infinitive. Thank you for showing me more information!
Also thank you for fixing my hieroglyphics, you really are a great help! Feel free to make improvements at any time!<--Aearthrise
E23
(Ⲁⲉⲁⲣⲑⲣⲓⲥⲉ) 23:48, 9 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Aearthrise Sure thing! The Collier/Manley book is decent as far as it goes, but definitely a bit simplified; it would be good to follow it with a more substantial grammar, like Allen’s Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs or Hoch’s Middle Egyptian Grammar.
As far as verb tenses go, Egyptologists have an unfortunate tendency to invent many different sets of terminology for all the verb forms. Collier/Manley’s terminology corresponds to the terminology used here on Wiktionary as follows:
Collier/Manley Wiktionary
infinitive infinitive
past perfect
general present imperfective
specific present periphrastic imperfective
future subjunctive
Lots of the less common verb forms are left out. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 00:38, 10 April 2018 (UTC)Reply

ϫⲱϫ edit

I need help finding the etymology of the term ϫⲱϫ(baked bread); I suspect that it is t-ḥḏ
t
X2
X4HD
.
@Aearthrise: It can’t be t-ḥḏ; Bohairic ϫ (č) can originate from Egyptian or g, more rarely from q or k, but not from t. And would be expected to result in ϩ (h) here, not disappear.
Černý gives an origin in Demotic gꜥgꜥ (loaf of bread), which is in turn a loanword from Semitic. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 21:22, 11 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Vorziblix: Thank you, Vorziblix 02:44, 12 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
Sure thing! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 03:11, 12 April 2018 (UTC)Reply

ⲉϥ-, Coptic Egyptian Gerund Form edit

Does the Coptic gerund form (ⲉⲥ-, ⲉϥ-, ⲉⲩ-, etc.) come from Classical Egyptian?

@Aearthrise: Assuming by ‘gerund’ you mean the circumstantial, then yes; it comes from everyone’s favorite sentence-initial particle jw. (The attached -ⲥ-, -ϥ-, -ⲩ-, etc. are just suffix pronouns.) — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 22:05, 13 April 2018 (UTC)Reply

Classical Egyptian Course edit

I like your work on the Classical translation of the bible.

I have been working on a Coptic Egyptian course for beginners- I would like to create one for Classical(Middle) Egyptian. Would you be interested in a collaboration?

@Aearthrise: Thanks! Sure, I would collaborate; I may not have much time for the next week or so, however, as I have to study for various real-life things. The course you made looks nice, too! A few points regarding it:
  • Modern Egyptologists generally avoid calling the writing ‘hieroglyphics’; they call it ‘hieroglyphs’ or ‘hieroglyphic writing’ or just ‘hieroglyphic’ instead. Thus, w:James P. Allen writes ‘Each sign in this system is a hieroglyph, and the system as a whole is called hieroglyphic (not “hieroglyphics”).’ This is sort of a weird shibboleth among Egyptologists.
  • Cartouches were used for certain royal names, but their use for the names of commoners was rare. Mostly the names of common people just had a man
    A1
    or woman
    B1
    determinative added to the end instead.
  • Determinatives change, even in the same word, based on what they refer to. Thus, jnpw as the name of a god could be written as
    in
    p
    C6
    , but as the name of a dog, the determinative would be expected to change to a dog, i.e.
    in
    p
    E14
    .
  • ‘Archaic Egyptian’ specifically means the type of Egyptian spoken before the Old Kingdom. Not a single complete sentence of Archaic Egyptian survives. It’s different from Classical (=Middle) Egyptian.
In general, looks like a promising start! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 03:16, 15 April 2018 (UTC)Reply

Special:Contributions/Damis Tyana edit

If you get a chance, here's a new user whose contribs could use a once-over. I was worried at first for obvious reasons, but it seems it's not a new account. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 02:57, 31 August 2018 (UTC)Reply

Sure! I’ll look over them. They seem to have unknowingly duplicated ṯwfj at ṯwfy, which I’ll clean up, but otherwise everything looks good at a cursory glance. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 03:52, 31 August 2018 (UTC)Reply
I appreciate it. Egyptian is just such a pesky language to take care of sometimes, the kind that we never make any headway on unless someone like you has devoted a lot of time to it. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 04:55, 31 August 2018 (UTC)Reply

cyphi edit

Is κῦφι (kûphi) this same ṯwfj? Because that Greek word ended up in chufa as a kind of sedge again and Hebrew סוּף (sūf, reed, bulrush) is from this Egyptian word. Please add the etymon at the Ancient Greek, Vorziblix, respectively state it if the Egyptian etymon is not known. Fay Freak (talk) 17:28, 5 January 2021 (UTC)Reply

@Fay Freak: Not in this case; κῦφι (kûphi) is from kꜣpt (incense), which we don’t have yet, but it’s a derivation of kꜣp (to cense), which we do. I’ll see about adding kꜣpt when I get the chance. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 01:08, 6 January 2021 (UTC)Reply

Special:Contributions/68.191.50.83 edit

A prolific IP has decided to enter the world of Egyptian. @Chuck Entz, is this anyone we know? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 23:18, 4 October 2018 (UTC)Reply

Ah, thanks for the heads up. I think Special:Contributions/24.105.170.133, who was also editing Egyptian onomastics today, might be the same person. So far their work seems decent enough as far as Egyptian is concerned, though several transliterations have needed adjustment. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 23:29, 4 October 2018 (UTC)Reply
Probably not. The IPs don't match, and their emphasis is different: they've been doing boatloads of name entries for some time now, and they've done more in Japanese than in any of the languages that have been the trademark of the person you seem to have in mind. They do seem to be focused on volume more than quality, so they bear watching- but that's not enough reason to use checkuser tools on them. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:19, 5 October 2018 (UTC)Reply
To be clear, I didn't think this was Bedrock or anyone else evading bans. I simply don't even look at IP addresses, whereas I know you keep track of ranges, so you might know if this is a known quantity or not. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 03:56, 5 October 2018 (UTC)Reply

Why is Old Novgorodian a separate language in Wiktionary? edit

Hello (again),

As far as I know (based on Russian sources like Zaliznyak's fundamental monograph), scholars consider Old Novgorodian a dialect, so it's surprising to see the lect as not an Old East Slavic variety (like, as was discussed above, New Church Slavonic is a variety of OCS in Wiktionary) and possibly etymology-only language (even though 'traces' of Old Novgorodian in Modern Russian, unfortunately, is a poorly researched topic), but a fully independent language.

What are the reasons for this? Was looking for a discussion which led to its creation, failed to find one and thought that you as an experienced editor may know.

Thank you in advance! Ain92 (talk) 21:11, 21 October 2018 (UTC)Reply

@Ain92 Hello! I suppose Old Novgorodian is treated as a separate language because it shows some very divergent phonological developments that suggest it split off from Proto-Slavic separately from (and earlier than) any other Slavic branch. In particular, Old Novgorodian is the only lect that apparently didn’t undergo the second palatalization in Early Middle Common Slavic. Since what we call ‘Proto-Slavic’ on Wiktionary is more specifically Late Common Slavic with some anachronisms, this would mean that Old Novgorodian was already splitting off by the time of our reconstructed Proto-Slavic, let alone Old East Slavic. It’s divergent enough that it’s useful to list it separately in the tables of descendants for Proto-Slavic entries.
There’s some discussion of these issues at this link here, but the editors didn’t reach any consensus, so not much came of it.
Personally, I’d be inclined to split New and Old Church Slavonic into different languages as well, but we’ve never worked out how to deal with all the different recensions of New Church Slavonic, so the old status quo of merging them has prevailed for the time being.
In the end, whether to call something a language or a dialect is mostly a matter of convention; after all, going by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic could be considered two dialects/registers of a single language, too. So we end up choosing whatever conventions are convenient for us on Wiktionary. In this case I think either way could work. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 05:35, 22 October 2018 (UTC)Reply
  • Thanks for an operative answer! I didn't have time to read the discussion you linked yet, so a quick preliminar answer before I get to it:
  1. Of course, I do know about non-palatalized (or to be more accurate, non-affricate) forms in ON. I should note that some traces of archaisms like кҍле and хҍрь were left in mid-20th-century Pskovian dialects (and also, more rarely, in Novgorod and Arkhangelsk Oblasts as well as Karelia), as found by Sofiya Gluskina in 1968 ("О второй палатализации заднеязычных согласных в русском языке"). Obviously, this doesn't make Pskovian dialect a separate language ;-D (and neither does retention of some ON-specific innovations).
    • There is actually a hypothesis that this 'non-affricateness' is a secondary phenomenon and thus a pseudo-archaism (Trubachev lists two articles on p. 1275 here), but to be fair I haven't researched it and have no idea how accepted it is.
  2. There are a lot of shared East Slavic innovations between ON and OES lects (perhaps most important of them being pleophony, but also the way of vowel denasalisation, семь, олень, etc.), and since only shared innovations and not retentions are important for phylogenetic studies it's a scholar consensus now that OES and ON descent from a common lect, see Krysko's 1998 article "Древний новгородско-псковский диалект на общеславянском фоне" (strongly recommend this one) and pp. 275–278 of Trubachev's 2002 monograph "Этногенез и культура древнейших славян. Лингвистические исследования".
    • As you may know, simple tree model doesn't handle innovations spreading over a dialect continuum very well, that's why wave model has been invented (you may imagine something like Innovation D on the figure in Wikipedia, but larger).
  3. Regarding the convenience, I don't like duplication like we have in отьць and which we are going to have in sheer numbers when we progress in adding ON lexical data. IMHO examples of both Latin and Ancient Greek show that having several varieties with different etymological codes under one umbrella term works quite good in Wiktionary. We may even reflect tsokanye in OES articles since phonetic templates can show regional and temporal variations in pronunciation.
  • I think the reasons listed above explain why all the Russian historical lexicography ("Словарь древнерусского языка (XI—XIV вв.)", "Словарь русского языка XI–XVII вв.", etymological dictionaries etc.) includes ON under OES, and that's why the aforementioned Zaliznyak's monograph is callet "Древненовгородский диалект" not "Древненовгородский язык". Ain92 (talk) 12:45, 22 October 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Ain92 I think you’re probably right. (Thanks for the Krysko article; I hadn’t read that before.) The Old Novgorodian entries we have right now are mostly words that differ from their OES counterparts, but there would be a lot of duplication if we expanded our coverage of either OES or ON. I’d suggest bringing it up at the Beer Parlour to see what other editors say. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 19:29, 22 October 2018 (UTC)Reply
  • I have read the Scriptorium link and don't think it changes my point, but on a second thought, I have another question for you: at what point in time do we, the Wiktionarians, end Old East Slavic? WT:AORV doesn't say a word about that, and BTW the issue has direct concequences regarding more new etymological languages which are in my opinion needed. Ain92 (talk) 16:36, 25 October 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Ain92 As far as I know, Wiktionarians have never decided on when OES ends and Russian/Belarusian/Ukrainian/Rusyn begin. This is because very few Wiktionary editors have worked much on Old East Slavic at all; we only have 141 OES entries after all these years. Since there’s no consensus, you could make a suggestion for an end date in the Beer Parlour and, if no one objects there, freely implement it. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 01:01, 26 October 2018 (UTC)Reply
  • Thanks for the clarification. Unfortunately I failed to find a scholar consensus on that in Russian sources and all the possible options have drawbacks, so I can't say I have a certain preference for one. However I may write a draft on the options for the community on the weekend. I think it's reasonable to treat this topic separate from Old Novgorodian, isn't it? Ain92 (talk) 09:25, 26 October 2018 (UTC)Reply
  • I find it strange to even consider that Old Novgorodian has split somehow. Of course Novgorodian was closer to Muscovite than to for example Cracovian. The second palatalization is just a random isogloss. All of Slavic is just a conglomerate of isoglosses, the formation of national languages and subsequent literary traditions just obscures it a bit. The question needs to be if there a lexical differences that justify different treatment. Other than that it looks like with Serbo-Croatian: The different results of ѣ are itching but we don’t want to duplicate all content because of this, we treat the lects together because they are mutually intelligible, forming and sharing vocabulary across this whole language area, and I imagine it the same in Russia. How was the cultural interchange between the Novgorod Rusь and the other Rusь? I imagine that the difference is rather like between Zeta and Raška: It turns out they still speak the same language in the lands in questions, and in Bosna too they do and even in Croatia, and likewise there wasn’t a distinct “Old Novgorodian that has been replaced by Old East Slavic”; only that peculiarity of lacking second palatalization has been levelled out, today’s Russian of Novgorod continues the former Russian of Novgorod, or formulated negatively, we have now Russian spoken in the Novgorod Republic area because there wasn’t a different language. Fay Freak (talk) 18:59, 25 October 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Fay Freak Yeah, I agree that merging the two is probably the right choice, as I said above. There are many more isoglosses besides the second palatalization dividing ON from OES — the second palatalization is just the oldest one — and there are also some lexical differences, but I don’t think they are extensive enough to justify separate treatment. However, as I’m no expert on OES, I can’t judge with certainty. The treatment of mutual intelligibility runs into the problem that the entire Slavic area was mutually intelligible until slightly after the end of the first millennium. Thus, OCS, OES, and Proto-Slavic could all be merged into one language if we were to strictly adhere to the criterion of mutual intelligibility. They’re mostly kept separate by reason of scholarly convention rather than having actually been separate languages at the time. But, regardless, (1) Novgorodian was certainly mutually intelligible with Old East Slavic throughout the course of its existence, and (2) scholarly convention does treat those two lects as a single language as well, and (3) it would be convenient for Wiktionary to avoid duplication, so merging ON and OES seems like the right way to go. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 01:01, 26 October 2018 (UTC)Reply

ideogram vs logogram edit

Hi,

Re. your Template:&ideo, most of the uses I've seen of it are actually logograms, not ideograms. In Egyptological parlance, most ideograms are called "determinatives". There may be others that aren't, but when a glyph is associated with a particular word (or even several semantically related words, distinguished by phonograms etc.), then it isn't an ideogram, but a logogram. The fact that there isn't a Template:&logo template for logograms suggests that perhaps the ideogram template is used for all logograms, which would be incorrect. I don't know, perhaps calling logograms "logograms" goes against Egyptological convention, but if "ideogram" doesn't actually mean ideogram when discussing hieroglyphs, then we have a walled-garden problem, and that will likely prove confusing to a lot of readers.

kwami (talk) 06:30, 27 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

@Kwamikagami: Hello! Indeed, it’s a problem of Egyptological convention not lining up with modern linguistic terminology. As far as glyphs go, most Egyptologists follow the system of classification used by Alan Gardiner in his 1927–1957 Egyptian Grammar, where he uses the categories ‘ideogram’, ‘determinative’, ‘phonogram’, and ‘phonetic determinative’. There have recently been attempts to rectify this state of affairs and figure out a better classification system — for example:
  • a 2012 paper, “Egyptian classifiers at the interface of lexical semantics and pragmatics”, uses the names ‘logogram’, ‘classifier’, and ‘phonogram (in the narrower sense)’ for the first three of these classes.
  • a few recent Egyptian grammars (Schenkel 1994, Winand 2013, …) have taken to writing ’logogram or ideogram’ instead of simply ‘ideogram’.
  • even more recently, a revised scheme was proposed in the 2015 “Hieroglyphic Sign Functions: Suggestions for a Revised Taxonomy”, which also provides a summary of the historical issues involved and previous proposals. Here a distinction is made between ‘logogram’, ‘phonogram’, ‘pictogram’, ‘classifier’, ‘radicogram’, and ‘interpretant’.
However, the field has not yet reached a consensus on what, exactly, a new system of classification for hieroglyphs should look like, even if there’s a widespread sense that the old terminology is outdated; the question remains debated. Simply for that reason, I stuck with Gardiner’s traditional categories, although it’s certainly not ideal. I’m not really sure what the best solution is here, as one choice of terminology would likely be confusing to students of Egyptian, while the other choice would be confusing to people coming to Egyptian from other languages or general linguistics. But I think your suggestion to use ‘logogram’ may be better, since even Egyptologists seem to be (slowly) moving toward using that term instead of ‘ideogram’. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 10:50, 27 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

I can certainly see that changing the categories themselves, or their membership, could be quite confusing, and I would have no idea what some of those proposed terms were supposed to mean. But I doubt that changing 'ideogram' to 'logogram' would be a problem, since people are presumably familiar with the latter, or at least it would take only a minute to become familiar with it. I remember the debate for Chinese, when English-language texts felt they had to explain that they weren't using the traditional term 'ideogram' because it was inaccurate. But then, that was back before 'logogram' was likely to have ever been encountered by the reader, and I don't think that's the case any longer. Presumably changing 'determinative' to 'classifier' wouldn't be confusing either, but since AFAICT the current name isn't misleading, I don't have much of a problem with it. Though it would be easier for newbies to learn, since it's self-explanatory, and I think we should keep the newbies in mind.

The problem I have with 'ideogram' -- besides the fact that they aren't ideograms -- is that it seems to perpetuate the pre-Champollion idea that Egyptian was some sort of magical mystery, rather than a normal language. I suspect it plays into New Age nonsense about pyramid power etc too. I can't demonstrate that, but even if it doesn't, I don't think we should be perpetuating inaccuracies on Wikt. Of course, the usage notes under the entry for 'ideogram' itself should explain that it's frequently used to mean 'logogram', especially for Egyptian (though still for Chinese as well), but noting inaccurate usage in the definition of a technical term is a different matter than using it that way ourselves.

Anyway, I would strongly support changing 'ideogram' to 'logogram', and moderately support 'determinative' to 'classifier' -- or maybe to 'determinative (classifier)' or 'classifier (determinative)', so we have both bases covered? Or maybe we do that with both categories? Then people could follow whichever terminology they're more comfortable with.

BTW, I want to thank you for the enormous amount of work you've done on the Egyptian entries. It's been a few years since the last time I looked something up, and I was a bit shocked at how much better the coverage is now. It's really quite an impressive amount of work. So, I'm chastised into just quibbling rather than ranting about improper terminology.

BTW2, do you have any idea what the vocalization of šdḥ (some sort of treated red wine) might've been? I don't even know if it made it into Coptic.

Thanks, kwami (talk) 05:56, 28 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

@Kwamikagami: Thanks! I’m convinced; I’ll change ‘ideogram’ to ‘logogram’ at the very least. There aren’t that many glyph entries yet, so it shouldn’t be too difficult.
As far as šdḥ goes, it survived into Demotic as štḥ but is unattested in any dialect of Coptic. I don’t think it’s attested in Greek or cuneiform transcription either, so unfortunately it’s unlikely that the vowels can be determined. (The expected Sahidic Coptic form would be *ϣVⲧϩ or *ϣⲧVϩ for some vowel V, depending on where the original stress was. Extremely speculatively, the Demotic vocalization might have been *šətáḥ, if the Greco-Egyptian word στάγμα (stágma) apparently used for this drink was an instance of phono-semantic matching. But this still wouldn’t help us find the Old Egyptian vocalization, since stressed a in a closed syllable before could go back to any one of the short vowels *i, *u, or *a — and the same is the case for unstressed schwa.) — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 13:00, 29 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. That's what I was afraid of. I'm interested in the Late Egyptian pronunciation, actually, so Demotic speculations might not be that far off. But I can always use the <e> convention if I have to. kwami (talk) 20:17, 29 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

EWDC discussion edit

Hello! I'm pondering doing EWDC again. See User talk:Equinox/EWDC. Equinox 04:00, 31 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for help with ꙁадьницѧ‎! edit

I appreciate it. Kevlar67 (talk) 16:26, 28 January 2019 (UTC)Reply

ⲁⲗⲟⲗⲓ edit

Hi. Is the etymology of Coptic ⲁⲗⲟⲗⲓ (aloli, grape) known? Does it occur in Egyptian? --Vahag (talk) 07:40, 9 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

@Vahagn Petrosyan: Hello! The etymology is indeed known; the Coptic forms (Bohairic ⲁⲗⲟⲗⲓ (aloli), Sahidic ⲉⲗⲟⲟⲗⲉ (eloole), Fayyumic ⲁⲗⲁⲁⲗⲓ (alaali), etc.) come from a Demotic ꜣlly (grape, vine), itself from Egyptian jꜣrrt (grape, vine).
This looks like a native Egyptian word in every respect: it’s not written using group-writing, as loanwords usually are; it obeys the compatibility constraints for consonants in Egyptian roots; it has an Egyptian feminine suffix -t, which regularly erodes away to a bare vowel by the time of Late Egyptian; and it’s attested continuously since the Old Kingdom. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 14:44, 9 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
This is very useful. Can you add the etymology to ⲁⲗⲟⲗⲓ (aloli)? --Vahag (talk) 16:14, 9 March 2019 (UTC)Reply
Sure, done! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 17:10, 9 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

How come you learned Egyptian? It must have been a fascinating story. edit

--I learned some phrases (talk) 21:13, 3 July 2019 (UTC)Reply

@I learned some phrases: Haha, it’s not all that fascinating, really. As a child I was fascinated by mythology (among many other things), first Greek and later Egyptian. I devoured books on Egypt, but as far as the language goes, I didn’t learn much beyond the uniliteral and biliteral hieroglyphs and a few words.
Then I set aside Egypt for a good while and turned to other interests, mathematics, physics, linguistics, and whatnot, and didn’t pick it up again until midway through university. In exploring linguistics I felt limited by the fact that most of my experience was confined to Standard Average European languages, and I wanted to have a better understanding of other areas of the space of all possible languages, so to speak. Where better to turn than my old friend Egyptian? So I made an attempt to learn it properly, with a serious modern grammar, but failed due to lack of time, being buried under my math degree. (For similar reasons, I also made an abortive attempt to learn Mandarin Chinese around then.) I finally made another concerted effort after graduating and was much more successful the second time around. Beyond the linguistic aspects, the cultures of the Bronze Age Mediterranean (and Egypt especially) still fascinate me — although my interest these days is maybe more anthropological than mythological.
So there you go! Like I said, not all that fascinating, but there it is. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 20:45, 4 July 2019 (UTC)Reply
(Hiding it absolutely wouldn't just make people want to read it more...) PseudoSkull (talk) 04:55, 5 July 2019 (UTC)Reply
Bleh. Well, too late now :P — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 05:01, 5 July 2019 (UTC)Reply
Well, it was a fascinating story! I had a very similar background, except for the weirder part, and more importantly, except for seriously returning to Egyptian. I've leafed through my copy of Allen's Middle Egyptian enough to know how it works, but not to really learn it. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 06:53, 5 July 2019 (UTC)Reply

Chinese - Egyptian question edit

Hello- I saw the 'foreign word of the day' on the homepage (ꜣḫw) and I wanted to thank you for your work on Egyptian. I would also like to ask you a question- does Egyptian have phonosemantic hieroglyphs, that is to say, hieroglyphs that contain a component that refers to a pronunciation clue and a component that refers to a semantic clue? I see you have a basic understanding of Chinese. We hear a lot of superficial comparisons between Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters in Chinese class- what's your perspective on the similarities and differences between ancient Egyptian vs. Chinese? Sorry to bother- thanks for your time.--Geographyinitiative (talk) 11:50, 18 July 2019 (UTC)Reply

@Geographyinitiative: The Egyptian writing system works similarly to Chinese in some ways — but the analogy is closer if you compare individual hieroglyphs with character components, and entire Egyptian words with characters (which after all generally corresponded to entire words in Old Chinese — less so in modern Mandarin). That is, individual hieroglyphs usually don’t have multiple components, but written words are commonly formed by putting together hieroglyphs with a phonetic value and hieroglyphs with a semantic value (“determinatives”). Thus in ꜣḫw you could see
Axx
W
as the phonetic component and
Y1
Z2
as the semantic component. The difference with Chinese is that in Egyptian they aren’t forced to fit in a single square block. So, to summarize, (1) individual hieroglyphs aren’t generally phonosemantic compounds, but (2) on the level of entire words, Egyptian and Old Chinese writing worked quite similarly. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 16:12, 18 July 2019 (UTC)Reply
This is a truly incredible knowledge you have! But I would like to say that based on looking at the article as it stands, I would not by any means have been able to determine that this hieroglyphic word is divided into two parts in the manner that you described! I really want that knowledge because I am tired of people making fun of me when I tell them Chinese characters have a phonetic component. In severe cases, they will resort to open-ended what-abouting concerning the "semi-
Axx
W
Y1
Z2
" (semi-magical) Egyptian hieroglyphs of which they know not a thing!
I would like to run a suggestion by you concerning the Etymology section of that word- (keep in mind I know NOTHING of Egyptian hieroglyphs): tell the readers about the semantic and phonetic components of the word. Wiktionary could do it perhaps in the manner of my suggestion below or in some similar manner (again, I know NOTHING of Egyptian hieroglyphs and am merely making wild guesses as appropriate wording):
Etymology
An abstract noun derived from
Axx
W
ꜣḫ (to be effective) (phonetic) and
Y1
Z2
w (semantic).
I put forward this suggestion because the vast majority of humanity does not by any means understand that the components of Chinese characters and the parts of Egyptian hieroglyphic words have a phonosemantic function in the way you and I are understanding it (if I am understanding it correctly!). In fact, there is a section of unscrupulous people who exploit the belief that Chinese characters are mystical/semi-divine pictographs to sell ideologies and books of drivel, all of which hinder the spread of the academic viewpoint on phono-semantic compounding in these languages.
The knowledge you have is something Wiktionary should tell readers about because a large part of the population is of the mistaken impression that these systems of writing are whimsical pictures imbued with some kind of semi-magic properties that the Latin alphabet lacks. You might have heard of the book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy-- in the book, John DeFrancis discusses the so-called 'The Ideographic Myth', the belief that the components of Chinese characters only convey meaning and don't have any relation to pronunciation. I believe that that myth is has a significant role in the inefficiency in Chinese language instruction.
In the Chinese section of this website, we have something called a 'Glyph origin' section- you can see an example of a phonosemantic compound character's glyph origin here: (léi). The 'Lei tai' page on Wikipedia current misinforms readers about the origin of this character by not telling them that the right-hand side of the character (the (léi) part) is connected to the pronunciation of the overall character.
It's just a suggestion- if you're not interested, forget it. Thanks for reading my screed! --Geographyinitiative (talk) 00:40, 19 July 2019 (UTC)Reply
I may have totally misunderstood what you meant. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 00:54, 19 July 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Geographyinitiative: No, I think you understood it pretty well! As for telling readers about the components of the written word (the functions of its constituent hieroglyphs, whether as phonograms, determinatives, etc.), this is something I’ve been thinking of for a long time, too. (You can see some previous discussion of the idea at Template talk:egy-hierotab.) However, there are a lot of complications that make it tricky to implement. A more complete breakdown of ꜣḫw would be as follows:
  • Ax
    — phonogram for ꜣḫ
  • x
    — phonogram for
  • W
    — phonogram for w
  • Y1
    — determinative for abstract notions
  • Z2
    — determinative for plural, uncountable, or collective nouns and pronouns
and probably the best way to display this information would be in a table somewhere, ideally unobtrusive. I’m not sure about putting it in the etymology section, since strictly speaking it’s not about the origin of the word but just the way it’s written; however, this may still be the best available option. There are several issues that would need to be resolved first, though, in any case:
  • Most Egyptian words can be written in a number of different ways, cf. the ‘Alternative forms’ section in ꜣḫw and many other entries. Would we display a glyph-by-glyph breakdown for every possible writing? Or, if not, how would we justify explaining one writing and ignoring the others?
  • The boundaries between phonetic and semantic functions are not always entirely clear. Thus, for example, the hieroglyph
    Z2
    originally served as a semantic marker of plurality without any phonetic value. Later, because the Egyptian plural ending is -w, the glyph
    Z2
    came to also be used as a phonogram for w in certain contexts. So in a word like ꜣḫw, it could theoretically be interpreted as either a semantic marker (of uncountability, in this case) or a phonetic marker (representing the w at the end). It’s not always clear which interpretation should be given preference, if any.
  • Ideally we would want each hieroglyph in the table to automatically link to the entry for that glyph, such that, for example,
    I6
    would link to 𓆎. This is doable, but annoying to implement from a technical perspective.
So there’s a few questions to be ironed out, and some coding to be undertaken, but I do agree in principle that this information would be good to display when we’ve worked out exactly how it should be done. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 16:42, 20 July 2019 (UTC)Reply

FYI edit

Not sure if you're on Discord, so I thought I'd leave you a message instead. In case you haven't seen: Special:Contributions/TheLateDentarthurdent. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 01:52, 2 October 2019 (UTC)Reply

@Metaknowledge: Ah, hey, thanks! I have indeed seen those edits, and still need to go through some of them (along with the work of another editor who’s added copious amounts of reconstructed Egyptian pronunciations lately), but for the most part they’re broadly in line with academic consensus and only differ from our practices in some details of convention, chronology, and so forth. Checking reconstructed pronunciations is unfortunately extremely tedious (digging up Coptic dialectal descendants, checking for Greek and Akkadian, etc., and coping with often questionable sound change laws), so I’ve been putting off working through the backlog, but bit by bit I’ll get there (I hope)! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 02:27, 2 October 2019 (UTC)Reply

Comment about Egyptian sorting in Community Wishlist Survey 2020 edit

I remember we discussed Egyptian category sorting. Recently, on "Multiple collations per site" proposal, I mentioned that Egyptian would benefit if the proposal were implemented and extended with a mechanism for adding custom collations, so that Egyptian transcriptions in Category:Egyptian lemmas and other Egyptian categories will sort correctly. So in case you have anything to add to that discussion, I thought I'd let you know. — Eru·tuon 19:28, 11 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

Sorry for the absurdly late response! I did read this earlier and vote for the proposal, but I didn’t have much to add otherwise (and forgot to leave a reply here). Thanks for letting me know (and for contributing to the proposal in the first place)! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 02:16, 15 December 2019 (UTC)Reply

Etymology of nk edit

Hi. I have created the Egyptian entry nk. I am also interested in the Arabic language. Recently I have noticed the Arabic verb ناك (nāka), which has the same stem and meaning. Both verbs are also transitive. And due to the Coptic descendant and my low experiences with reconstrucion of the ancient Egyptian, it could have the second vowel long (which the Arabic verb has too). Because I haven't been sure how to mention is in the etymology, I ask here if it is possible to mention it there and if you could help me. Or perhaps if it has been mentioned in any book yet. Zhnka (talk) 16:03, 2 April 2020 (UTC)Reply

@Zhnka: Hello! Sorry to reply a bit late; this has been a busy time in real life for me. The Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, volume 2, page 345, also mentions the comparison you’ve found. Under the entry for nk it says ‘vgl. arab. ناك, نكح’ (‘compare Arabic ناك, نكح’). It’s a good idea to mention it, maybe with similar wording (‘compare …’) since the exact etymological connection is unclear. The Coptic word ⲛⲟⲉⲓⲕ (noeik) isn’t directly descended from nk but from the derived term nkw (fornicator), with agentive suffix -w, so it’s not really useful for reconstructing the vowels. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 06:26, 4 April 2020 (UTC)Reply

Meroitic entries edit

Thank you for fixing up those entries! I got frustrated with Meroitic because of people pushing various interpretations about how to classify it, but I'm glad someone is finally giving it some attention. I think we should keep Latin-script entries as soft redirects, like we do for many other ancient languages with obscure or unique scripts. A Meroitic version of {{got-romanization of}} is probably the way to go; what do you think? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 05:00, 10 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

Sounds good to me! Yeah, I’m steering clear of the giant classification fracas as best I can; however many pages Rilly devotes to arguing for ‘Northern East Sudanic’ and how ‘the affiliation of Meroitic is settled’, it doesn’t look like it’s (yet) reached wider academic acceptance. For the most part I’m sticking to lexemes that multiple sources have identified as secure so as to hold words whose identification is motivated more by pet classification theories than clear evidence at arm’s length. Hopefully we can steer through this minefield intact. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 15:24, 10 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
Okay, turns out we can use the general template; see ant for how to format that. I haven't done the other ones, because you'll have to create improved entries for those romanisations. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 17:02, 10 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
Great, thanks! Working on them. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 23:35, 10 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

Images at ⲛⲟⲩϯ & ⲛⲟⲩⲛⲧⲉ edit

Are any of these deities attested in Coptic as deities (or demons)? I know Horus and Bes are attested, I guess Isis might be attested as well? I think it would be strange to have crufty images that aren't related to Coptic culture as opposed to earlier Egyptian culture. ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 17:24, 19 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

@Lingo Bingo Dingo: They’re attested in Old Coptic (which isn’t really a coherent dia-/chronolect so much as a catch-all term for pre-Christian texts, mostly magical payri). So, for example, in the Schmidt Papyrus we get Osiris, Isis, Ophois, Hathor, and Anubis. The Leiden Papyrus has Coptic ⲁⲙⲟⲩⲛ (amoun) as a gloss of Demotic jmn. Ra is attested in plenty of Coptic texts, and also as a demon in the Refutation of All Heresies (in Greek transcription from Bohairic Coptic). That said, I agree these images really aren’t representative of most of the timespan of Coptic culture and could probably stand to be replaced. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 15:01, 21 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
Late, late, late, I know, but I've been mulling this for a while and think that some images are justified since quite a few more are attested than I initially thought. But if Roman or Hellenistic alternatives are available, it would in my opinion be a good idea to use these ones instead. ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 11:11, 15 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

We sent you an e-mail edit

Hello Vorziblix,

Really sorry for the inconvenience. This is a gentle note to request that you check your email. We sent you a message titled "The Community Insights survey is coming!". If you have questions, email surveys@wikimedia.org.

You can see my explanation here.

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OCS declension edit

Hi. I am reading some OSC grammar book and try to implement declension templates properly. Probably there will be some errors, but I am doing it in a good faith :) --Mladifilozof (talk) 21:20, 2 November 2020 (UTC)Reply

@Mladifilozof: Hi! No worries, and thanks for the work so far. It’s great to see someone else interested in working on OCS. You’re on the right track, and we’ll get the errors fixed anyway, so don’t feel discouraged from implementing things here as you keep learning.
One small thing to keep in mind: masculine hard o-stem nouns and adjectives ending in к, г, and х need two extra parameters, the first one ending in ц, ѕ, or с, and the second one ending in ч, ж, or ш, respectively — otherwise it generates the wrong forms before -ѣ and -и. So, for example, at оукроухъ (ukruxŭ) you need {{cu-decl-noun-o-m|оукроух|оукроус|оукроуш}} instead of {{cu-decl-noun-o-m|оукроух}}, and for длъгъ (dlŭgŭ) you need {{cu-decl-adj-hard|длъг|длъѕ|длъж}} instead of {{cu-decl-adj-hard|длъг}}. Thanks again! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 22:03, 2 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
Тханкс. I managed to add one extra parameter to кротъкъ and глоухъ. I don't know what the 3rd should be. I tried to add глоух|глоус|глоуш but it seems that the 3rd one has no effect. --Mladifilozof (talk) 22:12, 2 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Mladifilozof: The third one only changes the masculine vocative singular. You don’t need it for neuter o-stems but you do for the masculines (and adjectives!). — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 22:14, 2 November 2020 (UTC)Reply

Hi. I need a small help with the templates. I guess we should use cu-decl-noun-a for землꙗ and змиꙗ, but I don't know how to handle the last diagraph ꙗ? Thanks. --Mladifilozof (talk) 09:48, 3 November 2020 (UTC)Reply

@Mladifilozof: Hi! They’re soft stems, so you can use {{cu-decl-noun-ja|земл|s}} and {{cu-decl-noun-ja|зми|v}}. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 13:33, 3 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
Хвала! --Mladifilozof (talk) 14:40, 3 November 2020 (UTC)Reply

Scribal abbreviations for Coptic nomina sacra edit

Hey Vorziblix. I'm curious how to type, and where to place, entries like ⲓ︦ⲥ̄ for ⲓⲏⲥⲟⲩⲥ (yes, I know that attempt at the overbar doesn't quite look right). I think it makes sense to lemmatise at the full spelling, despite its comparative rarity in MSS, but we should still have alt form entries for the abbreviations — I'm just not sure how. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 00:19, 1 January 2021 (UTC)Reply

@Metaknowledge: Hello! I agree that they should be lemmatized at the full spelling wherever possible. For the abbreviated forms (in alt-form entries etc.) I’d suggest they should be formed with U+0305 ‘combining overline’ over each letter rather than macrons. Then we’d reserve macrons for the ordinary superlinear stroke marking syllabic consonants. This looks to be what Unicode itself recommends; page 309 here gives the details. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 10:03, 2 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
Ah, so we want an entry located at ⲓ̅ⲥ̅ (i̅s̅) rather than at ⲓⲥ (is)? A bit tricky for me to type, but following the Unicode standard seems like the best idea. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 20:28, 2 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Metaknowledge: Hmm... between those two, I find myself not entirely sure. To me, at least, it feels like the abbreviation overbars are more integral to their words than the often-omitted (syllabic) superlinear strokes that we only give in the headword line, but I don’t have a strong argument in either direction. How do we do it for Greek? (I don’t think we have nomina sacra entries for Old Church Slavonic yet, otherwise I’d look into those too... What other languages could we compare? Gothic? Old Armenian? In any case, it might make the most sense to make it consistent with Greek.) — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 01:04, 6 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
I agree on all counts. Who would have an opinion? @Mnemosientje, Lingo Bingo Dingo? —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 04:03, 6 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
I have added the nomina sacra in Gothic without the line (see alt forms at 𐌹𐌴𐍃𐌿𐍃 (iēsus)), but have to admit I have no strong opinion on the matter. I tend to avoid scribal diacritics, nobody knows how to type them anyway, so I don't bother. If you are in doubt as to what the entry page should be, you could consider using the form without overline in the page name, but add the overline in an alternative head= parameter in the headword template. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 10:40, 6 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
Speaking of which, how do I add them? The online tool I used yielded 𐌻̅𐌿̅𐌺̅ (l̅u̅k̅) (for the Luke abbreviation), which clearly isn't right. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 11:00, 6 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Mnemosientje: You did it right! 𐌻̅𐌿̅𐌺̅ (l̅u̅k̅) has the Unicode-standard U+0305 over each letter. In my broswer it looks about as you’d expect (a continuous overline). If it looks strange on your end, it might be a font support issue(?). — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 16:17, 11 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
Yes, I suppose it must be a font issue then. On my browser it is not continuous, and in the transliteration the parts are not even of the same height. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 17:00, 11 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
If you're only going to create one entry, I'd create it at the entry without overbars/superlinear strokes just for searchability, but also add the diacritics via the head parameter. If you're going to create two entries anyways and turn one of them into a redirect, I don't have any opinion either way. ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 16:31, 6 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Metaknowledge, Mnemosientje, Lingo Bingo Dingo: That sounds fine to me, and I suppose it matches all the nomina sacra entries we currently have (I also checked Old Armenian and the links there are the same way). Do we want to settle on entry names without, and head parameters with, overbars, then? — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 16:17, 11 January 2021 (UTC)Reply

Upper and lower case in Coptic edit

I have just noticed that some links to Coptic, such as in translation tables, use upper-case letters. I believe the corresponding lemmas mostly use lower-case (I never used upper-case when creating entries because the writings I knew were basically all in majuscules anyway). The discrepancy between links and entries is far from ideal and I would like to know what you think the approach should be to upper and lower case. Do you think it should be a BP matter? ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 09:38, 9 January 2021 (UTC)Reply

@Lingo Bingo Dingo: I’ve always just used lowercase too, and would generally prefer keeping it all lowercase. Having text be single-cased is common practice in the field at any rate. The one complication is modern Coptic; I think modern Copts usually write Bohairic with both cases, if I’m not mistaken, so it might potentially make sense to have Bohairic entries with capitalization… if if weren’t for the fact that that would introduce a lot of pointless duplication of entries that exist in both Bohairic and other dialects. Maybe the most sensible thing would be to have all lemmas in lowercase, with Bohairic alt-form entries at uppercase forms where necessary. In any case I’d support changing all the links to lowercase; they should definitely match whatever lemma forms we choose. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 16:17, 11 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
Fwiw, the situation with Gothic, which is similarly an all-majuscule script based off Greek uncials, is that only lowercase is used for the transliterations as these case distinctions do not exist in the script and representing them in transliteration gives a misleading impression of the nature of the original script. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 17:02, 11 January 2021 (UTC)Reply

hbj edit

If we do not use other transliteration systems, then hby may be deleted (hbj is a transliteration). J3133 (talk) 14:20, 20 January 2021 (UTC)Reply

@J3133: I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand maintaining entries in so many transliteration systems as Egyptian has is not really feasible, and I’d be inclined to say that only entries in either our transliteration system or the Manuel de Codage system should be kept, and the rest should be deleted. On the other hand the entries that are already there (which are mostly old leftovers from when we didn’t have any consistent transliteration system yet) might be helpful to people looking for the entry, and their deletion is hardly worth the bother (it’s very far down my priority list, and other editors might not even agree on their deletion; I know some people supported keeping all the variant transliterations in the past). In any case they don’t belong under an “Alternative forms” header; we don’t list aiþs as an alt-form of 𐌰𐌹𐌸𐍃 (aiþs), or absida as an alt-form of абсида (absida), or whatever. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 14:36, 20 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
In the case of your examples, the entries are in their language’s script and the transliteration is already mentioned (in the head template), meanwhile Egyptian entries are located at one of its transliteration systems. J3133 (talk) 14:46, 20 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
@J3133: Sure, but the same principle applies. The numerous possible transliterations that we don’t give in our head templates aren’t listed as alt-forms either, because they’re not alternative forms of the word as actually used in the language (whether written or spoken) but alternative representations of the same written/spoken forms that we as non-speakers invent for our convenience. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 14:54, 20 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
My point is for those entries the transliteration are not as important (and could, therefore, be missing), as the entry is located at how one would usually find it written, whereas for the Egyptian one must use the transliteration Wiktionary favors in order to find the entries, also taking into consideration that the various transliteration systems are not universal. J3133 (talk) 15:09, 20 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
@J3133: I can see how that could argue in favor of having soft-redirect entries in the various different transliteration systems, but I don’t see why it would support listing them as alternative forms in the entries themselves. That just seems like clutter without benefit to readers, and moreover very misleading in certain cases; putting hby as an alt-form of hbj would imply two different hieroglyphic spellings under our transliteration system (say,
hbiiG26
vs.
hbyG26
), whereas they’re really intended as two representations of the same thing. If we really want to include things like hby under alt-forms they should at the very least be clearly marked as alternative transliterations, labelled with the source of that transliteration system, and separated out from the rest of the alt-forms. In that case some sort of template should probably be made to hold all the many possible variants in a collapsible table or some such. But again, I really don’t see any benefit. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 15:30, 20 January 2021 (UTC)Reply

A brief note of thanks edit

Hello Vorziblix! I write just to say that I am impressed by the size and quality of the work you've done here on Wiktionary, most of all in my case for Middle Egyptian - it is an inspiration to us all. My aim is to do the same for the languages in which I am interested, and your contributions provide constant cues on how I can improve my own. I must also thank for the patience in editing mine every time I fail to follow some practice which is obviously cemented and justified - trust me that I do them in goodwill, trying to get them right. Mere Seconds over Tokyo (talk) 21:36, 10 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

wꜣyšꜣtjsꜣpy edit

I saw that my edit on the wꜣyšꜣtjsꜣpy page was reverted. My change was based on the form recorded on Tavernier, Jan (2007) Iranica in the Achaemenid Period (ca. 550–330 B.C.): Lexicon of Old Iranian Proper Names and Loanwords, Attested in Non-Iranian Texts, Peeters Publishers, →ISBN, page 65, which records the form wꜣ-y-šꜣ-ti-šꜣ-p-y with no i or j after ti, although his transliteration of Egyptian appears somewhat inconsistent. 102.116.48.200 22:53, 10 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

Hi. You can’t just reverse-transliterate to get Egyptian hieroglyphic text; you will almost never get the right result. In Egyptian hieroglyphic writing there are many ways of spelling the same sequence of phonemes. Putting another
i
after
ti
does not add another j to the preceding tj; both
ti
and
tii
are transliterated exactly the same way, as tj (or ti in Tavernier’s transliteration scheme), because the
i
is a phonetic complement and not an independent phonogram. Hieroglyphic text should never be based on transliterations because there is no one-to-one mapping. Always go to the source text. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 02:30, 11 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
Yes, thanks for explaining. I guess that Tavernier's inconsistency in how he wrote the Egyptian forms (i.e. at one point he records a form wꜣ-šꜣ-ti-i-šꜣ-p but later writes [wꜣ-y]-šꜣ-ti-šꜣ-p-y for BdE's
SAtiiAa18
p
ii
, and alternatively uses jj and y for
ii
confused me for a while. I understand my mistake now and I'll avoid repeating them in the future. 102.115.138.195 19:53, 11 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
Ok, so I went back and re-checked all the hieroglyphic additions I made. Some were accurate, and some were erroneous and I've corrected them based on the source text. All the ones which can be found in Bibliothèque d'études de l'Institut français d'archéologie orientale du Caire and Annales du service des antiquités de l'Égypte are now accurate, but I don't have access to the one or two other texts cited by Tavernier, so someone who has access to them might need to re-check and correct them if I messed up on those. 102.115.140.149 05:18, 12 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

tꜣ-ḥnt edit

Could you please confirm to me if the third hieroglyph on the third "ḥent" entry on the page 32 is or isn't the hieroglyph D48A? And if yes, how can I render it through <hiero>...<hiero>, since I can't seem to be able to render it? Antiquistik (talk) 13:27, 11 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

@Antiquistik: Hi! You are correct, the glyph is indeed D48A. Unfortunately <hiero> can only render glyphs that are part of the list seen here, which doesn't include D48A. In such cases we use the template {{egy-glyph}} as a workaround. So, for example, to get
W10
t
 
you can type <hiero>W10:t</hiero>{{egy-glyph|D48A|h=16}}. (The h= parameter in the template just determines the height of the glyph displayed in pixels, if it's smaller than full height.) — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 14:35, 11 May 2021 (UTC)Reply
Thanks. Antiquistik (talk) 14:38, 11 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

Egyptian FWOTDs edit

If you happen to know any appropriate Egyptian, Demotic or Coptic FWOTDs, you are more than welcome to nominate them. ←₰-→ Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk) 18:12, 14 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

Expanding hieroglyphics' rendering edit

Hi. Would it be possible to potentially expand the <hiero> template to render all signs on the Wikipedia List of Egyptian Hieroglyphs rather than simply the ones on the Gardiner's Sign List? The template not rendering all the hieroglyphs makes it very difficult to add information to many articles on both Wiktionary and Wikipedia. Antiquistik (talk) 08:12, 15 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

Also, is the hieroglyph I posted below on the Gardiner Sign List or the Egyptian Hieroglyphs Unicode block? I've searched multiple times but couldn't find it. Antiquistik (talk) 13:23, 17 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
 
@Antiquistik Hi. Unicode (and the Wikipedia article you link) is horribly incomplete and contains hardly any more glyphs than WikiHiero (the software that provides our <hiero> tags). The glyph you gave me is F105,
 
, which is not included in either one. You can see a full list of more obscure glyphs by going through the subcategories of this page: Commons:Category:Gardiner's_list.
Expanding WikiHiero would be possible, but you’d have to go through Phabricator rather than doing it on-wiki, which is a huge pain. Also, to be frank, the WikiHiero software is vastly outdated and should be thrown out and replaced entirely — it feels like a bit of a waste to be working on expanding it under those circumstances. However, if you need to enter a glyph that is not included in WikiHiero’s repertoire, there is a workaround: you can use the template {{egy-glyph}}. I provided some details on how to use it in my response to you a couple posts higher up on this page. If you have other questions on how to use it, or if I could be of help in any other way, feel free to ask. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 22:28, 17 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Thanks! Is there any intention to replace WikiHiero in the short term? Because if yes, I'd rather wait until it's implemented to do some of the edits I've been stalling. And if no, then I'll do the edits. I also see that {{egy-glyph}} works only on Wiktionary but not on Wikipedia. Is there any other template I can use there? Antiquistik (talk) 14:28, 18 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Antiquistik On replacing WikiHiero: no, not to my knowledge. A few years back there was an attempt called Hierator, but for various technical reasons it ended up not being adopted. Since then no one’s yet tried again. I’d say feel free to do the edits you’re planning.
I created {{egy-glyph}} and most of our Egyptian infrastructure on Wiktionary, but I haven’t done much work on Wikipedia (and don’t have admin rights there), so unfortunately a lot of useful templates are still missing there. I don’t think any equivalent template for displaying hieroglyphs exists. It would probably be possible to copy over the code from Template:egy-glyph to Wikipedia, and I think the same template would work there if you did, as long as you also copied over the related template Template:egy-glyph-img. I can do it for you if you want; let me know. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 15:13, 20 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Sure, please do copy it. Thanks in advance! Antiquistik (talk) 17:09, 20 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Antiquistik Ok, done. You should be able to use {{egy-glyph}} on Wikipedia now. Unfortunately, Wikipedia has their CSS set so that anything in <hiero> tags gets put on a new line, so if you want to use {{egy-glyph}} inline with other hieroglyphs, you might need to use a table. (I and other editors fixed that here on Wiktionary, but only an admin can fix it there. In fact, it used to work properly on Wikipedia before they broke it a couple years back...) At any rate, it should, at least, be usable! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 18:02, 20 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Thanks! What kind of table do I need to use {{temp|egy-glyph}} inline with other hieroglyphs? Antiquistik (talk) 20:02, 20 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Antiquistik Something like <table><td><hiero>put glyph codes here</hiero></td><td>{{egy-glyph|put glyph code here}}</td><td><hiero>put glyph codes here</hiero></td></table> should do the trick. Basically, enclose each block of <hiero></hiero> tags and each separate instance of {{egy-glyph}} in a separate <td></td>, and then put the whole thing inside <table></table>. If you want a working example, I just edited the glyphs under w:Apep#Development to work that way. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 20:23, 20 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Thanks! Antiquistik (talk) 11:43, 21 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Sorry to bother you yet again, but how do I stack hieroglyphs when using {{temp|egy-glyph}} with the tables? Antiquistik (talk) 23:35, 21 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Antiquistik It's pretty much the same principle, only using the more complicated syntax shown in the template documentation with quad=. You'd just need to enclose each block of <hiero></hiero> tags and each invocation of {{egy-glyph-img}} in <td></td> and the whole thing inside <table></table> within each row of the stack. So if you wanted to get
O29
p p
z

t
 
for whatever reason you'd type <td><hiero>O29:p*p</hiero></td><td>{{egy-glyph|quad=<hiero>z</hiero><table><td><hiero>t</hiero></td><td> {{egy-glyph-img|O24A|h=20}}}}</td></table></td></table>. Unfortunately it's pretty hideously complicated to look at, but if you break it down it's not too hard to make sense of. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 14:44, 23 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Thanks! Antiquistik (talk) 20:42, 24 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

Coptic Pronunciation Labels edit

Hi @Vorziblix. I was in the process of removing these labels because of their use of unclear, non-scholarly, and often contradictory terminology. Pronunciations with the label “Late Bohairic” mostly reflect to Emil Maher Ishak’s reconstruction of the liturgical pronunciation of Bohairic before the reforms instituted by Pope Cyril in 1858. Confusingly, other entries feature the same pronunciation under the label “Old Bohairic.” Ishak’s pronunciation is indeed popularly referred to as “Old Bohairic” by members of the Coptic church who promote its use in the liturgy. These supporters disparage the modern church pronunciation by calling it names like “the artificial pronunciation” or “Greco-Bohairic.” Supporters of the modern church pronunciation in turn call Ishak’s formulation “Arabo-Bohairic” and the like. Such terms are highly politicized and are not used in scholarly literature on the subject. Other entries use the label “Old Bohairic” for what Coptologists would simply call “Bohairic,” ie. the pronunciation of Bohairic Coptic as a living language as known from the academic study of Coptic phonology. The label “reconstructed classical Coptic” is also used on Wiktionary entries in this same sense. Now, Ishak himself is very clear that his reconstruction was not meant to represent Bohairic as it would have been pronounced by native speakers—he aimed strictly to recover the pre-1858 church standard. The popularization of the term “Old Bohairic” has unfortunately caused this point to be lost on many people. Some of the transcriptions I removed may have been accurate representations of the liturgical pronunciations, but they were presented in ways which at best caused confusion and at worse misrepresented their content. It seems to me absolutely imperative that we first agree on neutral and unambiguous labels for the pronunciation standards of the Coptic church, for instance perhaps Liturgical Bohairic (pre-1858) and Liturgical Bohairic (post-1858). When liturgical pronunciations are not concerned on the other hand, there’s no need to use any labels other than “Bohairic,” “Sahidic,” “Akhmimic,” etc. This way Wiktionary can avoid giving the appearance of having taken a side on an intra-church, extra-linguistic debate. Rhemmiel (talk) 16:55, 23 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

@Rhemmiel: Hi! I agree that our labels were less than ideal and, especially where the term “Old Bohairic” was concerned, hopelessly confused; I also agree that we should decide on clear conventions as to what labels we want to use and switch over to an unambiguous standard. I don’t think outright deleting the liturgical pronunciations is the right way to go about fixing the current mess, though. Transcriptions should be fixed and properly labelled where present, but (IMO) we shouldn’t get rid of information on the main pronunciations actually in use among modern Coptic communities.
As to what labels we should use: Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like there’s a settled academic name for each of these pronunciations. I wouldn’t object to a solution like ‘Liturgical Bohairic’, though since the label will be parenthesized, having the dates in front (‘pre-1858 liturgical’, etc.) might be a better idea than putting them in another nested set of parentheses. I will note that terms like ‘Greco-Bohairic’ have indeed been used in scholarly literature, for instance in this paper. I can’t judge for myself whether such a use is seen as polemical or not among modern Copts. In the end I’m open to any reasonable solution, so long as we’re consistent.
For the pre-liturgical reconstructed pronunciation, I worry that leaving it unlabelled will confuse modern Coptic users. My inclination is to err on the side of explicitness, but I could probably be convinced otherwise. It might be worth bringing up the matter in the Beer Parlour and pinging other Coptic editors to see what they think about all of this. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 18:52, 23 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Vorziblix: Yeah you’re right, I should’ve started a discussion first. I’ll get around to it when I find the time. If you're interested here’s a blogpost on the issue written from the perspective of a Copt. Kinda changed the way I thought about it. Rhemmiel (talk) 05:24, 30 July 2021 (UTC)Reply

Evidence of *vьračь coming from "Dialectal Proto-South-Slavic" and *vьrati meaning "to utter a spell / to speak out"? edit

Hello Vorziblix!

Hope you're doing well. I got 2 questions for you about the Wiktionary entry for the word «врач»:

1) The Wiktionary page states that the word *vьračь comes to us from dialectal South Slavic Proto-Slavic. I've sadly haven't been able to find any evidence of that. Could you please tell me where you found that?

2) Furthermore, it also states that the word *vьrati meant "to utter a spell / to speak out", of which I can't find any evidence either. I tried checking the references but the former only lists the word вьрѣти and the latter solely provides textual evidence of the OCS word врачь. Could you please let me know where you found evidence of this verb meaning those 2 things?

Hope to hear from you, best wishes Міи (talk) 11:43, 8 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

@Міи: Hi! I’m trying to dig up what sources I used for this right now. If I remember correctly, I don’t think my sources were explicit about *vьračь being South Slavic Proto-Slavic per se, but all the known descendants of Proto-Slavic *vьračь are South Slavic, with the exception of Russian врач (vrač) (which is a borrowing from Old Church Slavonic). That suggests the Proto-Slavic word can only be securely reconstructed for the South Slavic branch. Max Vasmer’s Этимологический словарь русского языка lists the known cognates of врач (vrač) / descendants of *vьračь, and they’re all South Slavic: Old Church Slavonic врачь (vračĭ), Bulgarian врач (vrač), Serbo-Croatian вра̑ч, Slovene vráč. Bagrinovsky’s Краткий этимологический словарь mentions that the Russian form is borrowed from Old Church Slavonic (and therefore also South Slavic in origin), although I think I was looking at some other source for that information last time around.
For your second question, I’ll need some more time to search up my sources again. As you say, all this information isn’t in the listed references at the OCS entry; as far as I remember, I was planning on making proper Proto-Slavic entries for the words in question where the etymological references would be provided, but for some reason or other I was interrupted by real-life business and never got around to it. That’s my fault, unfortunately. Hopefully I can recover where I got those meanings from. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 21:55, 8 December 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Міи: Found my source! In A. E. Anikin’s Русский этимологический словарь, volume 9, under the entry for врач (vrač), *vьrati is defined as заговаривать (zagovarivatʹ, to begin to talk, to cast a spell). Hope that helps! Edit: Plus it does, in fact, explicitly mention that Proto-Slavic *vьračь was “dialectal South Slavic”. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 17:23, 10 December 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Vorziblix Amazing! Thank you very much! Best wishes Міи (talk) 20:35, 10 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

How we will see unregistered users edit

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ангелъ edit

Sorry about that, for some reason I thought alternative forms always had to be at the top! Prahlad balaji (talk) 14:59, 3 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

@Prahlad balaji: Yeah, no worries! WT:ELE allows both orders, but once upon a time (several years ago) they used to have to be at the top, so in many languages that’s still more common—but in a case like this, where they badly clutter up the entry before the definition, I think the other order works best. Thanks for adding the descendants! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 19:54, 4 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

Introduction for MdC Template edit

Hi. Because you have thanked me on my MdC abbreviation page, I post this to you. I also want to thank you for your work in making MdC redirects. MdC is useful transliteration way on PC, because it is really hard to type Egyptological special characters like "ꜣ".

I think this edit is a little bit annoying so I made the simple Template "Template:MdC" You can use this template in this form:{{subst:MdC|wꜣḏ}} thank you.--Sethemhat (talk) 02:46, 20 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

@Sethemhat: Thanks! That makes things easier. I’m not too active at the present moment, but it is a long-term goal of mine to eventually have MdC soft-redirects for all Egyptian entries that need them, especially since this is the way Egyptian terms are looked up in other online resources like the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae. Keep up the good work! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 03:28, 20 February 2022 (UTC)Reply
Thank you.--Sethemhat (talk) 22:51, 20 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

Minor problem with Template:R:egy:Wb edit

Your edits to the template and the parameters at sr don't seem to be getting along well. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:19, 1 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

@Chuck Entz: Whoops, sorry about that. I think the errors should be fixed now. Let me know if you run into any other oddness. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 03:52, 1 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

Linking at 𓂝 edit

Hi Vorziblix! Thank you for catching my mistake and for your thorough edit summary over at 𓂝.

Would it be appropriate to link to the translingual entry for in sense 1 instead? Winthrop23 (talk) 22:26, 7 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

@Winthrop23: Hmm. I’m of two minds about doing that. On the one hand, it does have logic to it. On the other hand, Egyptian has many different phonograms, some of which represent sequences of multiple sounds and wouldn’t make much sense to link that way, and linking this entry but not those would make them inconsistent with each other. I wouldn’t do it myself, but I’d probably not revert someone else if they wanted to. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 08:09, 8 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

Buzzard hieroglyph edit

I was trying to find an image of the G4 buzzard to illustrate the difference from the G1 vulture, and noticed that not only did the Commons category not contain glyphs I could easily identify as the buzzard, its description was conflating the buzzard with the Guinea fowl (G21). So I wanted to ask if you had time to look over the six images in commons:Category:Buzzard (hieroglyph) and see if they in fact contain the buzzard, and/or if you know of images of inscriptions that do use the buzzard. In particular, since 𓄿 says "in some inscriptions the two could also be distinguished by their colors", do you know how the buzzard was colored? - -sche (discuss) 03:10, 11 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

@-sche: As far as I can tell, all the photographs in commons:Category:Buzzard (hieroglyph) should instead be in commons:Category:Vulture (a hieroglyph). In File:Luxor Tempel 16.jpg and File:Luxor Temple 9545.JPG, they’re part of foreign place names transcribed using the so-called ‘group-writing’ system, which uses G1 but not typically G4; in File:Abydos Tempelrelief Ramses II. 26.JPG the glyph serves as a phonetic complement to
wA
wꜣ, and so represents G1 with phonetic value ; in File:Medinet Habu Ramses III 11d.jpg and File:Medinet Habu Ramses III. Tempelrelief 11.JPG the glyph forms part of the Late Egyptian possessive nꜣy.k (your), and is also G1.
Unfortunately this means we have no actual images of the buzzard identified as such on Commons, and I’d need to go hunt them out. I do know of some images of inscriptions where the buzzard glyph can be found, but unfortunately they’re either (1) not on Commons and don’t have a compatible license, or (2) of bad quality and not very useful for illustrating the difference from the vulture. (For example, File:Louvre hymne Imenmes.JPG contains the buzzard a number of times towards the left side of line 6, but it’s not very good as an illustration).
The comment about color comes from here, which makes no concrete mention of what color exactly the buzzard used but cites two sources: Elisabeth Staehelin’s “Zu den Farben der Hieroglyphen” in Zwei Ramessidische Königsgräber: Ramses IV. und Ramses VII, page 113, and Nina Davies’s Picture Writing in Ancient Egypt, page 27, neither one of which I currently have access to. It’s possible that there are more details on coloration available in either one of these two books, if you could dig them up somewhere. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 08:33, 11 June 2022 (UTC)Reply
I see; thank you. I appreciate this and have recategorized the images. I'll see what I find. I spotted images of facsimiles of Menkheperraseneb's tomb which seem to have the buzzard in kftyw (edit: on closer inspection they may be the quail chick, the images are not in a great state of preservation and resolution), but Commons only has the other half of the scene, and while their position is that faithful reproductions of old hieroglyphs are public domain, I'll have to ask whether that covers those facsimiles. (This different image elsewhere of that placename is using the quail chick, right? Should we have an {{altform}} section at kftjw pointing to kftyw?) Amazon's preview feature shows me this in Davies' book, with the yellow-headed, green/blue-winged vulture and a yellow-with-red bird that looks like the buzzard, and Google Books provides the snippet to confirm my hunch: "Pl. IV, 1. Egyptian Vulture. Phonetic ꜣ 'vulture' (G1). From the tomb of Rekhmire (no. 100). White ground. Although the bird in outline differs little from the long-legged buzzard (G4, our Pl. IV, 3) with which the Egyptians sometimes confused it, there is no resemblance in the painted examples and these do not vary." Perhaps this explains why someone painted the bird in File:Abydos Tempelrelief Ramses II. 26.JPG yellow and someone else then categorized it as the buzzard? - -sche (discuss) 21:30, 11 June 2022 (UTC)Reply
In poking around I also found this, with images, which broadly agrees that the vulture has a yellow or red head, black beak(-tip) and eye black, blue wings, white breast/tail with a red outline, red feet )although "variants show many diffferent colours, from virtually all white, through all yellow to all blue", perhaps explaining Ramses II's relief, if the colours on it are rue to what would've been there in-period), whereas the buzzard is yellow, with red accents. - -sche (discuss) 23:43, 11 June 2022 (UTC)Reply
@-sche: Yep, that image has the quail chick. kftyw should be lemmatized at kftjw in our transliteration system; I’ll move that one and msḫtyw to their proper titles. Thanks for the sources on color, and for recategorizing the images! I believe you’re right, too, about the comment on your final link being applicable to the coloration seen on Ramesses’s relief. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 20:03, 14 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

Padisematawy's hieroglyphic name edit

Could you please help me identify the hieroglyphs used to write Padisematawy's name in this article? I have identified
p
,
D37
,
 
, and
zmA
, but I am having trouble identifying the others. Antiquistik (talk) 17:36, 14 June 2022 (UTC)Reply
@Antiquistik:
p
D37
 
zmAwAD
is the complete name, so you were very close to getting the whole thing. (The next two glyphs aren’t part of the name but spell mꜣꜥ-ḫrw, which the article’s author didn’t bother translating.) The combination
 
wAD
is a logogram for tꜣwj (the Two Lands), with one plant representing Upper Egypt and the other representing Lower Egypt; in this case the scribe put
zmA
in the middle of them to represent their unification (cf. zmꜣ). — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 20:03, 14 June 2022 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for the help! It's much appreciated! Antiquistik (talk) 20:09, 14 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

Cuneiform template edit

Would it be possible for you and/or for @Profes.I. to create a template similar to the one used for hieroglyphic rendering, but for rendering Neo-Assyrian period cuneiform?

I have tried adding Neo-Assyrian period cuneiform text to Wikipedia pages, but it seems that they do not display properly for readers who do not have the appropriate fonts installed on their devices, so a template that would render the phonetic values or names of the signs as the images used to display the signs in {{cuns}} would be pretty useful as a replacement. Antiquistik (talk) 11:47, 23 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

@Antiquistik: Possibly! We would need to have images of all the signs uploaded somewhere on Commons first, though; I don’t know if we currently have any images to draw from. If we had images of each sign, with consistent filenames so that whatever code we typed in could automatically be referenced to the appropriate one, it would probably be fairly easy. (Easier than hieroglyphs, I think; cuneiform doesn’t need all the table infrastructure that our hieroglyph templates use, since AFAIK cuneiform signs don’t get stacked on top of each other but are just ordered linearly.) Maybe something like {{Template:t2i}} would be sufficient? — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 00:14, 24 July 2022 (UTC)Reply
@Vorziblix Sorry for not replying earlier, I forgot about this. Are all the cuneiform signs required for setting up such a template already on Commons? Antiquistik (talk) 17:29, 21 September 2022 (UTC)Reply
@Antiquistik: Hi, sorry I was away for a few months myself. Unfortunately I really don’t know enough about cuneiform to judge this accurately. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 02:52, 4 May 2023 (UTC)Reply
That's not an issue. I have decided that using the Unicode-encoded cuneiform signs is better. Antiquistik (talk) 09:23, 2 July 2023 (UTC)Reply

OCS Discord Server edit

Hello! In our quaint OCS discord server we've been using the transcriptions you've put up on your website(they're absolutely brilliant btw!) quite a bit but just now I noticed you're also active on wiktionary. Would you like to join us there? — Огн҄еметъка (talk) 10:55, 28 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

Hieroglyph help edit

Which crossed out hieroglyph is it that precedes
SAAm&a n
A
in the first line of page 151? Antiquistik (talk) 11:28, 12 February 2023 (UTC)Reply
Never mind, I managed to identify it. Antiquistik (talk) 19:44, 17 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

Although, could you please provide me with an Egyptian language in Roman alphabet transliteration of the sentence "Montu and Set are with him in every fray; Anat and Astarte are a shield to him" on plate 80 of this? Antiquistik (talk) 20:19, 17 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

@Antiquistik: mnṯw stẖ ḥnꜥ.f m skyw nb ꜥnṯt ꜥsṯrṯt n.f m jkm. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 02:53, 4 May 2023 (UTC)Reply
Thanks! Antiquistik (talk) 09:22, 2 July 2023 (UTC)Reply

Need your input on a policy impacting gadgets and UserJS edit

Dear interface administrator,

This is Samuel from the Security team and I hope my message finds you well.

There is an ongoing discussion on a proposed policy governing the use of external resources in gadgets and UserJS. The proposed Third-party resources policy aims at making the UserJS and Gadgets landscape a bit safer by encouraging best practices around external resources. After an initial non-public conversation with a small number of interface admins and staff, we've launched a much larger, public consultation to get a wider pool of feedback for improving the policy proposal. Based on the ideas received so far, the proposed policy now includes some of the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, best practices for gadgets and UserJS developers, and exemptions requirements such as code transparency and inspectability.

As an interface administrator, your feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome until July 17, 2023 on the policy talk page.

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thanks edit

for your edit to Wiktionary:Community Portal. It's one of those things we look at every single day and get so used to clicking the same links that we forget to think it might be possible to improve. Soap 18:46, 8 October 2023 (UTC)Reply

@Soap: Sure, glad I could do something helpful! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 01:51, 9 October 2023 (UTC)Reply

Verb conjugation under "declension" header edit

Hello, really glad you're back to editing Egyptian! I know I'm going to sound picky, but I've noticed that you put verb conjugation table for egy entries under "declension" header. I do realize that "declension" is a somewhat broader term, nontheless it seems to apply more to non-verbs' word changings, moreover other languages put declension under declension header and there is no dissonance, so to speak. Should we probably do something about it? Is it related to how grammarians view egyptian verbs as an enigmatic category? Nominkhana arslang (talk) 17:21, 19 October 2023 (UTC)Reply

@Nominkhana arslang: Hi, and thanks! Sorry for the late reply; I was away traveling in October. To the best of my knowledge, I have never used the ‘Declension’ header with verbs, Egyptian or otherwise; if you could point out some examples, I’d be glad to fix them. I generally label the header ‘Inflection’, which is a broad term that subsumes both declension and conjugation under it. Let me know if I’ve missed something somewhere and accidentally labelled a verb with ‘Declension’—that really ought to be fixed! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 16:48, 17 November 2023 (UTC)Reply
Yeah, my bad. Didn't realize egy verb tables have conjugation as well. Nominkhana arslang (talk) 19:41, 17 November 2023 (UTC)Reply

The article before gerund in English edit

Regarding recent edits. What has man missed? I knew well possessive determiners being used in the very context, though it be oftener in old-fashioned and more formal sources, correct for “the subject of a gerund construction”. One grammarian forms the example sentence: The having been accustomed ‘to an abundance’ renders poverty more inconvenient. But this was 1842, and was it too theoretically contrived not to be considered wrong? Fay Freak (talk) 15:46, 17 November 2023 (UTC)Reply

@Fay Freak: Hello! Indeed, the usage with a possessive determiner is perfectly fine (if a bit formal), but at least to a contemporary-English-speaking ear the same construction with a definite article sounds very awkward at best and outright ungrammatical at worst. (Not all examples of definite article + gerund fall into the same case; as a rule, for instance, the + a bare gerund sounds perfectly fine.) That 1842 example you found is very interesting—perhaps this kind of construction did exist in earlier English, but if so, I’ve very rarely encountered it; or perhaps it is just contrived for the grammarian’s purposes. It’s hard to say without more examples to look at. On a cursory search, I was able to find a small handful of parallels in older texts, one from the 1600s and several from the 1800s. So maybe it isn’t contrived after all, just obsolete.
I did find a more detailed and somewhat more recent (1926) grammar of English that has this to say on the subject: ‘[…] constructions of this description in which the adnominal element is represented by either an article or a demonstrative pronoun, are clumsy and are, therefore, mostly avoided. Conversely those in which the complex gerund is preceded by a genitive or possessive pronoun, or by no, appear to be quite common, at least in literary English.’ This roughly tallies with my experience, though I think the ‘clumsy’ construction, which was already rare, has become even rarer to the point where (outside some specific contexts, perhaps) contemporary speakers would likely consider such phrasing highly confusing or simply erroneous. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 16:41, 17 November 2023 (UTC)Reply
This is satisfying. Fay Freak (talk) 19:38, 17 November 2023 (UTC)Reply

List of hieratic glyphs edit

Is there anywhere on Wiktionary or Wikipedia—or failing that, anywhere else—that has a comprehensive table of hieratic glyphs? (Anything more comprehensive than Roberson's Very Brief Introduction?) I don't want to reinvent the wheel if someone's already done the work somewhere, but if no-one's done it I'm tempted to throw together ≈ a modified version of List of Egyptian hieroglyphs that adds another column for showing the corresponding hieratic glyph(s).
Also... since Unicode considers hieratic a font variant of hieroglyphs... if I upload a systematically-named set of hieratic glyphs, or if one already exists, can we expand {{character info}} or some other template to not only show an image of the hieroglyph, but also an image of the hieratic glyph? This would be particularly useful for glyphs like 𓆅 that only existed in hieratic (where we're currently not showing the form that actually existed), but would also be interesting in general IMO. - -sche (discuss) 15:23, 27 January 2024 (UTC)Reply

@-sche: The standard work in the field for that is Möller’s Hieratische Paläographie in four volumes, available for instance here — unfortunately very old and quite cumbersome to work with, but still unsurpassed for what it is. There’s also a somewhat better organized/more searchable version digitized at [3], which might be easier to work with. (The original work is not organized according to Gardiner’s list but has its own idiosyncratic numbering scheme; the latter website lets you look up the snippets that correspond to each Gardiner number.)
I think your proposal would definitely be worthwhile, although I would note that hieratic writing was not a static thing but evolved through various stages itself, so choosing one particular hieratic form to represent a given glyph may not always be straightforward. Möller’s text, for instance, has a sequence of columns showing hieratic forms from different time periods chronologically. Maybe it would make more sense to do something like we do for Chinese character entries, where multiple forms of the character over time are displayed under the ‘Glyph origin’ header (see for an example of what I mean). However, that would be a lot of work, and even displaying one hieratic image would be a great improvement over our present situation. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 23:07, 27 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
Aha, thank you!
I mocked up a limited, squarish presentation at 𓁐 and 𓐍, but I agree showing a progression and using a layout more like Chinese would be ideal. Having gotten confirmation from Commons that I can do this, I hope to isolate the glyphs from Möller's text and upload them using some systematic naming scheme — I'm thinking something like "Hieratic Möller B1 Abusir" (using the Gardiner number where available, plus the column headers from Möller), "Hieratic Möller B1 Hatnub", "Hieratic Möller B1 Hatnub 2" (for the second of the Hatnub glyphs he provides, "3" for the third, etc), "Hieratic Möller B1 Ennene", etc, if that sounds reasonable to you? Then I think it should then be possible for an *{{Egy etym}} (or whatever) template to identify what hieroglyph/Gardiner number it's on (the same way {{character info}} does), check for the corresponding files by trying out all of the short list of possible column headers, and display the times/places for which files exist. Ideally, I'd like to also upload color images where possible; I named the two I uploaded to 𓁐 and 𓐍 using the names of the tombs they were in, but if I switch to naming them "12D", "18D", etc based on dynasty, that should also be something the template could make a check for (run through all the possible dynasties and display the ones for which images exist). Maybe I should check in the GP whether that would work.
For glyphs which don't have Gardiner numbers, do you know if there are agreed-upon pseudo-Gardinerian numbers? E.g. I haven't spotted Möller's glyph of the frontal view of a man standing with his arms and legs spread leaking fluid in Gardiner's list. (I see the .jp site has G. numbers for them; I will use those.) - -sche (discuss) 22:14, 29 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
@-sche: Ah, that would be excellent! I think all of that sounds reasonable and well-conceived; I'd be very happy to see something like it implemented. (Though you crossed it out, there are indeed schemes for extending Gardiner numbers beyond the basic ones. Unfortunately several competing standards exist, but probably the most commonly used one, and the one that Wiktionary templates like {{egy-glyph}} follow, is the Hieroglyphica sign list. Luckily it seems that this is exactly the list that the .jp site follows in its numbering.) — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 20:25, 31 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
Are there Gardinerian numbers for Möller's 27, 28, 29, or 69? Those are the ones I've processed so far for which the .jp site didn't have a G-number.
Is there information out there about which hieratic and/or hieroglyphic signs (besides uniliterals) are most common, e.g. a concordance of any reasonably large/representative text or collection of texts, or failing that, is there any large text(s) in a machine-readable form that I/someone could make a concordance of? If not, I will ask in the GP if it is possible to make a concordance of the contents of wiki-hiero and egy-glyph tags/templates on Wiktionary. I'm thinking, given how much time scraping glyphs from Möller's text is taking, it'd be useful for me to prioritize the most common glyphs. So far, I have at least one image (usually from volume I, escalating to volumes II or III where things are not present in I) and sometimes the full suite of images, of Möller's 1-33, 45, 61-78, 91-100, 124-126, 169, 192, 196-200, 236-239, 250, 260-263, 282-283, 319, 331, 335, 342, 366, 388, 395-397, 403, 431-432, 511, 522-525, 528, and 574-575. - -sche (discuss) 00:17, 5 February 2024 (UTC)Reply
OK, further discussion is at: Wiktionary:Grease_pit/2024/February#Possible_for_template/module_to_check_for_and_display_systematically-named_files?. :) - -sche (discuss) 22:47, 8 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for responding to my tea-room request! edit

Thanks for making this edit at cool! 166.181.88.109 03:57, 30 January 2024 (UTC)Reply

Sure thing! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 20:26, 31 January 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hieroglyphic entries edit

It seems that Unicode will be expanding the number of encoded Egyptian hieroglyphs to cover what seems to be all recorded signs in September. Assuming that support for the Egyptian hieroglyph format controls will also be available by then, would we be creating hieroglyphic entries on Wiktionary after this, or will we maintain the current scheme for covering Ancient Egyptian entries? Antiquistik (talk) 17:27, 21 February 2024 (UTC)Reply